Canaan Group: Building the future of hospitality from the ground up

Location: Portugal

See how Portugal’s Canaan Hub is using Cloudbeds to build a connected, flexible foundation for a new kind of hospitality concept in Montijo.

“The less time our teams spend dealing with systems, the more time they have for the guests. For me, that's ultimately what technology in a hotel should achieve.”
— Vitor Tavares, General Manager, Canaan Group

Key insights

Cloudbeds sits at the center of a connected technology ecosystem designed to reduce manual work and complexity
An intuitive, cloud-based platform supports Canaan’s flexible approach to hospitality and collaborative team culture
Starting with a scalable technology foundation gives Canaan room to evolve beyond its first property

The story

Opening in Montijo, Portugal, Canaan Hub is a new hospitality concept that brings together hotel rooms, serviced apartments, coworking, restaurants and bars, meeting spaces, and social areas all under one roof.

The ambition is to create somewhere that belongs as much to the local community as it does to travelers.

“We don’t want Canaan Hub to feel like a place where you simply check in, sleep and leave,” explains General Manager, Vitor Tavares. “We want people to use the building, meet each other and feel comfortable spending time here.”

A guest might arrive for a one-night business trip, another could stay for several weeks. A local resident might come for coffee, while someone else spends the day coworking before meeting friends at the bar. That flexibility is central to the Canaan Hub concept, and it also makes building the operation behind it considerably more complex.

“We aren’t operating just one type of hospitality business,” he explains. “We’ll have leisure and corporate guests, groups and long-stay residents, as well as coworking, meeting spaces and several F&B outlets.”

For Canaan Hub, building something different therefore meant thinking differently about the technology behind it.

A rare opportunity to start from zero

Vitor Tavares brings 11 years of hospitality experience to the project, beginning as a Front Desk Agent before moving through operational and management positions across international brands, boutique hotels, and lifestyle properties.

Along the way, he’s experienced firsthand how hotel technology often creates more work instead of removing it.

“I’ve worked with several PMS solutions during my career, and one of the biggest frustrations has often been having too many systems that don’t communicate properly with each other,” he says.

The consequences were equally familiar: information scattered across different places, teams manually transferring data between platforms, and reporting becoming more complicated than necessary.

Opening Canaan Hub presented a rare opportunity to avoid inheriting those problems.

“Because Canaan Hub is a new opening, we had a rare opportunity to start from zero. I didn’t want to reproduce some of the problems I’d experienced in previous hotels. I wanted us to start with something simpler and more connected.”

Building around one connected foundation

Cloudbeds stood out as a platform capable of putting several important parts of Canaan Hub’s hotel operation within the same cloud-based environment.

Just as importantly, it offered the flexibility to connect the other technology the team wanted around it.

“Another important point was integrations,” he explains. “We wanted the freedom to choose the other systems that made sense for our operation and connect them around Cloudbeds.”

Today, Cloudbeds sits at the center of Canaan Hub’s developing hotel technology stack, alongside RMHUB for revenue management, Lighthouse for market intelligence and rate shopping, Sesame HR for HR management and recruitment, and additional solutions covering areas including access control, maintenance, and hotel operations.

With the property still in pre-opening, the team is taking the opportunity to connect and test that ecosystem before welcoming its first guests.

“I’d much rather identify problems now than after we have guests standing at reception.”

The objective isn’t technology for technology’s sake. It’s an operation in which information flows more freely, employees spend less time navigating systems, and managers have better visibility when making decisions.

“As General Manager, I don’t want my teams spending unnecessary time on administrative tasks or moving information between different systems,” he says. “I’d rather they spend that time with guests or managing the operation.”

Technology people don’t have to think about

Ease of use was another important consideration.

Canaan Hub is building a culture around three ideas: connection, authenticity, and energy. Rather than creating rigid barriers between departments and job titles, the team wants employees to collaborate, take responsibility, and help wherever they’re needed.

Technology has to support that philosophy rather than get in its way.

“We can teach someone how to use Cloudbeds, follow a procedure or understand our operational standards,” he explains. “It’s much harder to teach someone to genuinely enjoy interacting with people or to naturally care about the experience they’re creating.”

That makes intuitive technology particularly valuable. Instead of hiring around complicated systems, Canaan Hub can prioritize the human qualities it wants its team to bring to the guest experience.

Cloudbeds’ onboarding has also supported the property through the unusual demands of pre-opening.

“The team has been available when we’ve needed them and we’ve had good support throughout the implementation,” he says. “Pre-opening is a particular situation because you’re setting up the system while the operation itself is still being built. Things change constantly, so having people on the other side who understand that and can adapt with us has been important.”

Building for the group Canaan aspires to be

For now, success has a straightforward definition: open Canaan Hub successfully and establish the concept in Montijo.

Once the model has been proven, the team sees the potential to develop the Canaan brand while maintaining the modern, flexible approach to hospitality, local connections, and focus on people being established at the first property.

That long-term view also influenced the decision to choose Cloudbeds. “For me, it wasn’t just about choosing software for the opening,” he says. “We wanted a platform that could continue supporting us as the business develops.”

Satisfied so far, the team has already added five new properties to the onboarding flow: Canaan Boutique Apartments Fanqueiros, Canaan Lifestyle Apartments Combro 77, Canaan Boutique Casa do Monte, Canaan Boutique Apartments Gaivotas I, Canaan Boutique Apartments Gaivotas II.

When asked about the advice he would give to other independent hoteliers reconsidering their technology, he responds “Think beyond what you need today. Changing systems takes time, so you need to think about where your hotel will be in two, three or five years.”

Original story on cloudbeds.com: https://www.cloudbeds.com/customers/canaan-hub/