Introduction
For those in the hospitality sector, delivering an excellent guest experience is critical. The ease of a guest’s journey, from making a reservation, to checking out, is likely to influence whether they will return to your hotel for a future stay.
Many hotels are turning to custom mobile applications as a way to build digital concierge solutions, maximise revenues from upselling, provide streamlined services, and drive repeat business.
The team at Appricotsoft has assisted hotel brands in transitioning their hotels from an MVP (minimum viable product) at one location, to a fully functional rollout throughout multiple locations. In this article, we will discuss the step-by-step process of developing a hotel guest experience app; from the first sketch of your guest journey on paper, to launching your guest’s mobile app in the app store, to integrating the app into existing business processes, to training your front-line staff to utilise the app to serve your guests better.
Why Build A Hotel App Now?
The hospitality industry is rapidly changing. Guests are expecting conveniences such as digital check-ins, contactless payments, in-app room service, and personalised upselling opportunities. If your hotel does not provide these options, there is a good chance that your competition will.
Digital concierge applications are no longer an optional service; they are an essential component for hotels to use as their primary method of collecting data, increasing revenues and improving guest satisfaction without relying on third-party providers for most guest-related services.
1. Engage and Involve the Guest in the Process of Defining the Application
Every successful application starts with the user. For a hotel application, the user experience starts from the moment the potential guest discovers the hotel through the time the guest checks out of the hotel. The following are all important areas to consider when developing an application for a hotel.
- How do potential guests learn about your hotel?
- How do potential guests communicate with hotel staff? When do they communicate?
- How do potential guests expect to complete tasks on their phones?
At this point, we may talk to stakeholders (e.g., hotel managers, front desk personnel), look for patterns among support tickets, and/or develop a mini-design sprint to identify what parts of the guest experience are most important to guests.
Next, we will identify the main purpose of your application. Is it to provide a booking engine? Is it to provide in-stay services? Is it to provide opportunities for customers to purchase loyalty points, upgrades and special offers? We will prioritize these purposes based on what guests would find the most valuable.
We utilize several types of tools during this step of the process, including: journey mapping workshops; competitive audits, and technical feasibility studies.
2. MVP planning / Build the most valuable features on your product first
MVP (minimum viable product) does not mean “basic.” Rather, an MVP is the creation of a small portion of your product that meets a specific purpose while delivering value and confirming the validity of any assumptions made.
For hotels, the MVP usually contains these five key features:
- Mobile Check In/Check Out
- Room Service Ordering
- Simple Upsell Path (e.g., Late Check-Out, Minibar)
- Push Notifications
- Hotel Information/Concierge Chat
We work closely with our partners to define which features will provide the greatest impact to the business along with maximum value to guests.
Our Unison Framework provides a structured approach for defining the features and functions for your MVP and how to avoid the scope-creep trap.
3. Integration Phase: Bringing the App to Life
The majority of hotel app projects begin to falter and sometimes fail during this phase, as it is centered on the big difference between the system and its Integration. The Integration phase is critical because most hotels are using many different systems to run their business, including PMS, channel managers, and payment processors. The result is a lot of complexity and sometimes, outdated technology stack, as many of the systems were developed years ago.
My company manages all of the integrations needed for hotel apps, including:
- PMS: Oracle OPERA and Cloudbeds
- Booking engines: SynXis and Bookassist
- Channel Managers
- Payments to hotels
- 3rd Party APIs to provide maps, room key, and loyalty functionality.
My team has extensive experience in developing software for the hospitality industry and thus, we have designed the integrations in a way to make the process as easy as possible through phased integration and comprehensive documentation.
4. QA & Iteration: Testing with Real Guests
After the Hotel App is built and operational, we will then test it with real hotel guests, (or test with a selected hotel). The usability testing will give us the opportunity to identify friction points, edge cases, and gaps within the user’s journey prior to launch. The focus is on:
- How many taps does it take a guest to complete a task? For example, Can a guest order breakfast in under 3 taps?
- Identifying bugs and test coverage
- Setting up in-app analytics.
In order to shorten feedback loops and to build quality into our product rather than adding quality at the end, we utilize the AI powered quality assurance (QA) cycle provided in the Unison Framework.
5. Multi-property rollout: Think Scalability Early
It’s easy to roll out a product to one hotel, but getting it set up in 50 of them is not nearly as simple. Our architecture and delivery process allow:
- To deploy white-label solutions on a property-by-property basis
- To control which features are enabled on a location-by-location basis
- To build back-office dashboards for hotel staff that are easy to use at scale
- To isolate and protect the data of each hotel and to adhere to local and European privacy laws such as GDPR.
We take care of submitting your application to the App Stores, managing the various versions and ensuring it performs well across iOS and Android devices.
When looking for a development partner for your React Native or Cross-Platform App, this approach will save you an estimated 30-40% in development time and costs.
6. Staff Training & Change Management
A hotel application will be of little use if your employees do not utilize it, or believe in it.
We provide ongoing support throughout the rollout of the application with:
- Employee training materials and live onboarding support
- Admin Panel Tours
- Playbooks for hotels to support the upsell of additional services and support
- Templates for communicating with guests
We have witnessed how an employee’s adoption of the application can affect the experience of the guests they support; therefore, we view employee training as part of the launch process, not something that comes after the application is launched.
7. Start your project and measure how successful we have been
Once your app goes live, we will build a dashboard with key metrics to track, including:
- Percent of Activation Compared to Guests per Stay Logins
- Percent of Use of Feature (ex: Room Service Orders)
- Percent of Conversion Success from Upsells and Loyalty Signups
- Dates and Numbers of Support Calls Reduced
Your teams will have dashboarding tools that clearly outline metrics calculated in your usability-testing processes.
How Appricotsoft Builds Hospitality Apps Differently
Unlike many mobile application development companies, we do not only write code. We assist our clients in designing a successful hotel/restaurant experience through the Unison Framework, a transparent delivery methodology that allows for the predictable achievement of project goals, while eliminating costly detours.
As a result of utilizing the Unison Framework, our previous successful hospitality projects include:
- myREST (Restaurant Guest Experience Platform with Loyalty and Targeted Marketing)
- VRPartments (Mobile Immersive Real Estate Platform)
- and many other Digital First Product Projects created with care, ownership, and an understanding of user needs.
We are not a generic mobile application development company; we focus exclusively on developing custom mobile applications for industries where the user experience is everything. In the hospitality industry, Appricotsoft specializes in developing mobile applications.
Ready to Get Started on Your Digital Concierge App?
We want to talk with you about your goals. Are you launching a new digital concierge app or replacing an existing legacy solution? At Appricotsoft, we are ready to talk about your hotel’s needs and your rollout goals.
👉 Get a quote for hotel app development
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