Eklo moved ten French hotels to Apaleo, and says group bookings were the reason

Eklo Hotels, a French economy group with ten properties, has moved its whole portfolio onto Apaleo. The detail is more interesting than the headline, because the trigger was not cost or a cloud migration. It was group bookings.

Eklo piloted Apaleo at its Bordeaux hotel in November 2024 and migrated the remaining hotels between January and May 2025. The account comes from a case study Apaleo contributed to Hospitality Net in October 2026, so treat the enthusiasm accordingly. The operational specifics are still useful.

Why they moved

The forcing event was the Paris Porte de Versailles hotel, which opened in 2024. Between individual bookings and group business, the volume of manual reservation work there stopped being survivable. Rates, card handling and prepayments were all being done by hand.

Karine Girard, regional operations manager at Eklo, put it plainly: "We were losing time with a lot of repetition of human tasks, which inevitably means a lot of errors."

Porte de Versailles alone handles roughly 40 group enquiries a day with a five-person commercial team.

What changed

Card details are now tokenised and pre-authorised in the system instead of keyed in. Backyou, a group booking tool, connects to Apaleo so option requests land in the PMS and are confirmed after validation. Daily reporting for both the hotels and head office generates automatically, where previously each hotel sent figures by Excel extract.

Three integrations are complete, including a digital guest journey for selling upgrades and extras. A guest journey CRM is being finalised, and stock management between the restaurant POS and Apaleo is in progress. Eklo also runs chatbots through a partner, Bowo, for simple guest questions.

Girard describes the relationship as "a real collaboration, real long-term communication".

The numbers, and what they are worth

Girard estimates at least two minutes saved per booking during the integration stage. Applied to 22,142 bookings in June 2025, the case study arrives at 738 hours returned to staff in that month.

That calculation is an estimate multiplied by a volume. It is not measured, there is no baseline from the previous system, and no cost figure appears anywhere. Read 738 hours as the shape of the claim rather than its size.

Apaleo says it serves more than 2,200 properties in over 30 countries.

What it means for operators

The transferable lesson is about where PMS pain concentrates. Eklo did not replace its system because the old one was broken across the board. It replaced it because one new high-volume property made manual group handling impossible, and group business is exactly where most mid-market PMS setups are weakest.

Girard is also careful about the limit. "The idea isn't to have a 100% digital hotel group," she says. And on what decides it: "What will make the difference in the end is people."

If you are running group enquiries through inboxes and spreadsheets at one busy property while the rest of the estate copes, that is the pattern Eklo describes. It does not improve on its own.