Backyou logoCase study · Backyou

How Backyou optimised margin on every group request.

Backyou runs group sales for hotels. With Sidenet, the judgement that used to sit with one experienced commercial now runs on every incoming request — in seconds, for the whole desk. No margin left on the table.

Company
Backyou — group-sales platform for hotels and hotel groups
Users
Commercials who work the deals, directors who watch the book
Built with
Sidenet — agents, workflows, embedded SDK
NPS
10 / 10How Backyou rates Sidenet (Net Promoter Score)
01 · The company

What Backyou does: group sales for hotels, end to end

A company needs forty rooms and a meeting room in October. The request arrives through a form on the hotel's site, by email, or through an agency channel. Backyou carries it from there: qualification, the quote, the negotiation, the option, the booking, the payment schedule, and the function sheets that tell the kitchen and the front desk what is happening on the day.

02 · The problem

How hotels were losing margin on group requests

Backyou came to us with a problem their hotels knew well. Group business is where a hotel makes its margin, and every request asks the same thing: take it, decline it, and at what price. Say yes to the wrong one and you have blocked nights a better deal needed. Say no to a good one and a competitor gets it.

Answering properly meant checking the client's history, the company's conversion record, what else was bidding for those nights, what was already booked, and whether a framework agreement capped the price. Six screens, every time.

AG
Antoine de Corson
Chief Executive Officer
Backyou
Sidenet didn't arrive asking us to explain hospitality. They already knew how a group desk works, what a hotel checks before saying yes, and where the margin hides. We spent our time on the product, not on educating a vendor.
03 · Challenges

Three challenges to tackle before launching to production

Scoring a demand well is easy to describe and hard to run in production. Compliance, an API that was never meant for agents, and a hotel group behind a single login — here is how each was solved.

01
Compliance

Data that could not leave Europe, or enter a prompt

Every model in the chain had to be EU-hosted, and no personal data could travel into a prompt that did not need it.

Solved

Compliant by construction

The agent runs on an EU-hosted model behind Sidenet's PII guardrails — personal data is stripped before a prompt ever leaves, keeping the chain compliant by construction.

02
Integration

An API built for a screen, not for an agent

One analysis needs a dozen endpoints, most paginated, most returning fields the decision never uses. An agent left to walk that surface gets page one of the competing demands and stops — the score comes back confident and incomplete.

Solved

One clean payload, assembled through a workflow

A workflow gathers what the decision needs — every endpoint, every page, stripped of the fields it never uses — and hands the agent one clean payload to reason about.

03
Tenancy

Sixteen hotels behind one login

A group runs a central desk across its properties. A commercial on one hotel must never see another's clients, rates or pipeline; the director above them must see all of it. An agent that reasons over everything is exactly the thing that breaks that.

Solved

Their API, their permissions

Every agent calls Backyou's own endpoints with the logged-in user's scope. Nothing is re-modelled or cached on Sidenet's side — the permission Backyou already enforces is the permission the agent has. One hotel never sees another's data, and Backyou wrote nothing to guarantee it.

OG
Olivier Gonnet
Lead Engineer
Backyou
Our API was never designed for agents, and we changed almost nothing. Sidenet's workflows, guardrails and EU models absorbed all of that complexity on their side — we were live in weeks, not quarters.
04 · The Sidenet solution

Sidenet put a verdict on every request — and a specialist network behind everything else.

One workflow and one agent for the flagship, and a network of specialist agents for everything else on the desk — all connected to Backyou's APIs. The workflow assembles what the decision depends on; the agent returns the verdict, scored, reasoned, and ranked against everything else open.

The build: one workflow, one agent — and a network for the rest of the desk

Workflow
Data gatherer
Demands · p.1–nContactsCompaniesCalendarSpacesAgreements+6 endpoints
one clean payload
Loops every pageStrips unused fieldsCaller's scope
Agent
Scoring agent
Reads the one clean payload and scores the demand on six axes, each measured against the hotel's own history rather than a generic benchmark.
EU-hosted modelPII guardrails
Six scoring axes, with an example demandClient recurrenceCompany performanceBudget potentialLength of stayPeriod demandSpace availabilityClientrecurrenceCompanyperformanceBudgetpotentialLengthof stayPerioddemandSpaceavailability
Priority4.3 / 5
Network
Specialist network

One chat in Backyou. An orchestrator reads every question and hands it to the specialist that owns it; each specialist has its own tools, its own model, and hard rules about what it will not guess.

Orchestrator
Reads the ask, routes to the right specialist(s)
  • Sales
    Decides on incoming demands — take, decline, at what price
    Can I go down to €130 a night on this one?
  • Pipeline
    Triages what's open, what's stalled, what to chase first
    Which of my 23 pending demands should I take first?
  • Clients
    Goes deep on one client, company or dossier
    What's this company's history with us?
  • Revenue
    Director-level numbers across properties and periods
    How is next quarter tracking against last year?
  • Product
    How Backyou itself works, for new users
    How do I set up a framework agreement?

The outcome: what changed for hoteliers

Better margin on group business

The take, decline and price call is made against the hotel's own history and calendar.

Hours become seconds

The analysis that meant an afternoon across six screens is done before the reply goes out.

Priority, not just volume

Twenty demands or two hundred, ranked. The commercial knows what to work on first.

The whole team can decide

The judgement that lived with one experienced commercial now runs for everyone.

BA
Baudouin de Saint André
Chief Product Officer
Backyou
It never felt like a vendor relationship. Every question got an answer the same day, usually with a proposal attached. They were consultative from the first call — challenging our assumptions, not just taking requirements.

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