🏢 Client Profile & Project Overview
| Industry | Hospitality |
|---|---|
| Location | Los Angeles, California, USA |
| Project Category | IT Support |
【Company Overview】
The U.S. hotel management company interviewed for this case study operates a conveniently located hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Offering comfortable amenities and services, including electronic bidet toilets (Washlets) in all guest rooms and an on-site Japanese restaurant, the property serves a wide range of travelers as an ideal base for both business and leisure.
A US-based hotel operator entered into an annual 50-hour managed IT support contract with JBS USA. Under this agreement, JBS USA serves as the company’s IT support partner, handling day-to-day IT operations.
JBS USA spoke with YS-san, from the hotel operator’s team, about what led to this partnership, the results so far, and what’s ahead.
Q1. Can you tell us about your business?
We operate multiple hotels across the United States. Rooted in the spirit of Japanese hospitality, we provide comfortable, high-quality hotel service to both business and leisure travelers.
One of our properties, located near Los Angeles, blends Eastern and Western comfort — featuring rooms with Japanese design elements, a Japanese restaurant, and a spa. Another property sits in the heart of downtown Los Angeles, combining a distinctly Japanese atmosphere with everyday convenience.
Q2. What is your role and focus in your US operations?
Our US operations are centered around the Los Angeles area, where we serve a broad range of guests — local customers, business travelers visiting from Japan, tourists, and clients from Japanese-affiliated companies.
The area around our Los Angeles property has a strong concentration of Japanese-affiliated businesses, and the hotel itself is located near several major Japanese companies, making it a convenient choice for business travelers.
Looking ahead, we’re planning to open a new hotel in Texas as part of our continued expansion across the US.
Q3. Before working with JBS USA, what IT challenges were you facing?
Running a hotel means relying on a wide range of IT systems every day — front desk operations, back office, reservations, email, PCs, networking, account management, and more.
At the same time, it’s not easy to hire a dedicated, on-site IT person who can handle every question and issue that comes up. We felt we needed an outside resource we could turn to for day-to-day IT issues — things like PCs, Microsoft 365, networking, printers, and account management — whenever they came up.
In the hotel business especially, IT issues can delay operations or affect the guest experience, so having a system in place for quick support and response was important to us.
Q4. What led you to choose JBS USA?
JBS USA understood what it takes to run IT operations in the US as a Japanese-affiliated company, and being able to communicate in both Japanese and English gave us real peace of mind.
It wasn’t just about technical support, either — their ability to communicate with an understanding of both our Japan headquarters and our US operations was another reason we chose them.
Beyond getting IT support here in the US, having a partner who understood our business sensibilities as a Japanese-affiliated company, and how we like to report and consult on issues, gave us a lot of confidence.
Q5. What specifically have you found most helpful about working with JBS USA?
Having a place we can turn to right away for day-to-day IT questions has been a big help.
Whether it’s PC settings, account issues, Microsoft 365, networking, or printers — even the small stuff — we can reach out and get a quick response instead of trying to handle it ourselves internally.
Q6. Since starting this support arrangement, has anything changed in terms of your internal IT operations or peace of mind?
Having a clear point of contact for IT has given our team a lot more peace of mind.
Before, whenever an issue came up, we had to figure out who to ask and how much we should try to handle internally. Now we can just reach out to JBS USA, which makes it much easier to get moving on a problem right away.
Q7. Looking ahead, is there anything you’d like to focus on with IT?
Beyond day-to-day IT support, we’re hoping to work on things like governance around AI usage and broader operational efficiency.
As AI adoption grows, we think it’s important to put the right rules and management structure in place to make sure we’re using it safely and appropriately.
We also occasionally get IT audit or verification requests from our Japan headquarters that are difficult to handle from our US location alone. JBS USA already supports us with this, and knowing we have a partner we can turn to for headquarters-related requests and audits going forward is a real source of confidence.
Running a hotel means getting a lot done with a lean team. Beyond day-to-day IT support, we’d like to keep working with JBS USA on things like AI adoption, IT governance, audit support, and operational efficiency.
If your company is considering IT support or looking to streamline operations through IT support services, we invite you to sign up for a free consultation with JBS USA.
