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196+ Awards is a brand of PKF hospitality group, an international consultancy for hotels, living, tourism, and leisure with roots going back to 1869, and an independent hospitality practice since 1927. Today, more than 100 consultants work across 21 offices in 15 countries, from Vienna to Milan to New York.
Under the 196+ brand, PKF brings together its industry formats: the 196+ forum, roundtable, and summit, alongside the three 196+ Awards at the centre of this case study.
196+ Awards presents three of Europe's best-known hotel prizes each year: the Hotel Design Award, the Hotel Property Award, and the Hotel Innovation Award. The ceremonies take place in Vienna, Munich, and Milan. Applications come in from hotels across the continent, from new builds to revitalised historic properties.
Before kwapso got involved, managing all three programmes ran on a system the team described as outdated, expensive, and hard to use. There were no modern tools to manage applications and jury scoring efficiently. Applicants, jury members, and the team itself could not rely on the process to simply work.
Each of the three awards operates on its own rules. The Hotel Property Award asks for investment costs, floor area data, and RevPAR figures. The Hotel Design Award and Hotel Innovation Award use different evaluation criteria, often with the same jury members voting across multiple categories at once.
The 196+ Awards core team is two people. There was no time and no in-house development capacity to build three separate application processes, an admin tool, and a jury portal from scratch, then set it all up again each year. What they needed was not a one-time tool. It was a system that could carry the operation reliably for years.
The platform decision led to one coherent system across all three awards. The application starts on the Webflow landing pages. The actual submission runs through a multi-step application funnel in Glide, capable of processing up to 1,000 entries per cycle.
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Automated emails with dynamically generated variables, including the award year and application deadline, mean the team no longer has to update these texts manually each year. In the admin area, the team sees every application at a glance and can pull exports when needed.
The jury portal brings the scoring for all three programmes into one place. It calculates averages automatically and shows each jury member only their own assigned categories.
Since the initial build, the collaboration has followed a fixed rhythm: three times a year, a new award cycle is set up with updated content, deadlines, and documents, coordinated through the kwapso ticketing system. When an award is live, ongoing support is available for the team, applicants, and jury.
Within this rhythm, features have emerged over time that were not part of the original plan: an automatic PDF export for individual applications, automatic Google Drive folder creation per hotel, more precise formulas for investment costs and RevPAR, a clearer logic for which jury member sees which category. Each of these additions came not from a new large project, but from a specific need that became visible during a live cycle.
Preparations for the 2026 cycles of all three awards are underway, with updated landing pages, new deadlines, and the same tools that have proven themselves over years. kwapso stays on board through every application and jury cycle, not just at setup. The next visible goal: making it even easier for the team to filter and compare applications across multiple award years.
Since launch, more than 100 hotels from across Europe have applied through the tool for the three 196+ Awards. During an active award cycle, the team counts between 50 and 70 active users per month: applicants, jury members, and the internal team, all working through the same system.
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- Application funnel: replaced the previous, inflexible application process and handles up to 1,000 submissions per award cycle.
- Admin dashboard: replaced the manual collection and downloading of individual application documents, including automatic Google Drive filing per hotel.
- Jury portal: replaced the separate, manual scoring and average calculation across three awards.
- Landing pages: replaced the previous, off-brand presence for the three awards.
Are you managing multiple parallel programmes across spreadsheets, email, and ad-hoc phone calls? We will look at it with you in a structured conversation.