Five Years of Development, More Than One Million Euros Invested and a Hotel as a Testing Ground: ESC on ELITE
Five years of development. More than one million euros invested. A hotel used as a real-world environment in which to observe, develop and test solutions.
In the interview published by ELITE, Jan Vlasák describes the journey of ESC from a particularly practical perspective.
And between technological development, buffet management, staff turnover and modularity, one thing stands out above all: optimising a hotel means addressing very different types of challenges.
The buffet: forecasting instead of relying on intuition
One of the examples presented in the interview concerns buffet preparation.
Guest numbers, nationalities and historical consumption data are used to estimate the required quantities more accurately.
According to the interview, this approach contributed to achieving a 28% reduction in raw material costs related to buffet management at the Bonfanti Design Hotel.
This does not simply mean preparing less.
It means trying to align production more closely with actual demand, reducing what remains unused without compromising the variety offered to guests.
Staff: what happens when experience leaves?
ELITE then addresses a completely different challenge: staff turnover.
In hotels, a significant part of the know-how is often held by people.
An experienced employee knows how to handle a particular situation, understands a procedure, remembers a problem encountered in the past and possesses knowledge acquired over years of work.
When that person leaves the hotel, some of that knowledge risks leaving with them.
For this reason, one of the objectives described in the interview is to standardise and preserve procedures and information, making them available to future members of the team as well.
The value of experience remains with people, but what the organisation has learned can remain within the hotel.
A one-size-fits-all solution would make little sense
A small independent hotel does not operate in the same way as a large resort.
Departments, number of employees, services, volumes and priorities all differ.
The interview also addresses this aspect through ESC’s modularity: each hotel can choose the features that are consistent with its specific needs.
It is a concept that goes beyond software.
An optimisation project should also avoid starting with a pre-packaged solution.
For one hotel, the priority may be Food & Beverage. For another, housekeeping. For another still, purchasing, internal communication or staff organisation.
What can we learn from this experience?
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of five years of development is not any single feature.
It is the variety of different problems that had to be observed.
The buffet is about forecasting and waste. Staff turnover is about knowledge. Modularity is about the differences between hotels. Integration is about information.
These challenges may appear unrelated, but they share the same underlying need: understanding what is really happening within the hotel before deciding where to intervene.
This operational experience also forms the basis of ESC Agency’s work.
Read the full interview in The Elite (No. 1/2026, pp. 150–152)
Would you like to understand which of these results could also be achieved in your hotel?
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