Introduction
A hospitality software development company must never commence with screens, features, or sprint estimates alone! In hotel projects, the real work happens before the initial screen, feature, and estimate of sprints; the real work includes understanding the operation of the property, who has ownership of the decisions that will be made, what the guest journey actually looks like, and how the current tech stack works in the real world.
This is what discovery workshops are for.
For founders, hotel groups, and operations leaders, a discovery workshop is not an “extra meeting” but the fastest path to fewer inaccurate assumptions, fewer unexpected integration issues, and a better rollout plan. When properly conducted, a discovery process enables a hotel to move from a general idea (e.g., “we need a guest app” or “we want to digitise operations”) to developing an execution plan that includes the following: priorities, constraints, next steps, and metrics to measure progress.
At Appricotsoft, we believe that the software should solve real issues, should be built using clear specifications, and should provide something that all parties can be proud of, so we focus on keeping things transparent, simple, and results-oriented, right from the beginning. Therefore, we have a delivery approach that supports predictable progress, visibility of trade-offs, and a consistent weekly alignment; artificial intelligence supports execution, while people remain accountable for the outcome of their execution.
Why Discovery Is Important in the Hospitality Sector
Most hospitality projects are not a simple ” just make a mobile application”.
Hotel ecosystems usually have a variety of different groups with different interests involved, operational realities at the hotel level, many guest facing touch points and dependencies on multiple systems that might be connected with Property Management Systems (PMS), Channel Managers, Booking Engines, Payment Processors, Electronic Door Locks, Customer Relationship Management Systems (CRM), Housekeeping Workflow System, Loyalty Systems, and Reporting Systems. Appricotsoft’s hospitality-related content consistently points to the following four areas being key to the success of developing a mobile application for a hotel: Architecture, Integration, Rollout, and Feature Prioritisation.
This is why it is important to conduct a thorough Discovery Phase for your company. You are developing an application for the hospitality sector by asking and answering the following four questions early on:
- Who is important and who makes a decision?
- How does the hotel actually operate?
- What does the guest’s journey look like across channels and events?
- Which systems will need to be connected, and how much do actual integrations constrain?
If these four areas are undefined during the Discovery Phase, the project generally pays for them later through Rework, Rollout Friction, Delayed Integrations, and Low Adoption Rates.
What discovery workshops for hotels should cover
A useful discovery phase is structured, but it should not feel heavy or theoretical. It should help hotel teams and product teams get to the same picture of reality quickly.
1. Stakeholder Mapping
A hospitality software project will involve more people than newcomers anticipate.
A single hotel project involves many people, including: property owner, general manager or regional leader, operational management, front office, housekeeping, guest services, marketing/revenue team, IT, and finance, and potentially many outside vendors. In cases where multiple hotels are developed or purchased, the needs at the individual property level may have differing requirements compared to what was agreed upon at the group level.
Stakeholder mapping helps answer:
- Who owns business goals?
- Who owns the budget?
- Who approves scope decisions?
- Who will use the system every day?
- Who must support rollout and training?
- Who can block integrations or security approvals?
- Who is responsible for ongoing content, campaigns, or operational updates after launch?
This may sound simple, but the failure for most companies during the discovery phase is when they design the new software to support the loudest user solely in roome ro, om versus what the person executing the daily workflow actually needs.
Example: Leadership and/or the owner want to improve guest satisfaction/experience and develop additional revenue via upselling. The front desk staff wants to improve their ability to check in guests quickly by reducing the number of manual phone calls and repetitive data entry, but they may not see that being supported via software development direction. The revenue management team wants to maintain consistency within current systems for booking engine/channel management; housekeeping wants visibility into room status and to know that the timing of service requests will be timely. A successful discovery workshop discovers and facilitates the discussion of these differences and will not allow them to create a conflict that is discovered later on during the course of delivering the solution.
The expected output from this step is not just a simple contact list; it will generate a complete stakeholder map which includes stakeholders’ role, level of influence/importance within the organization, level of decision making authority, criteria for determining if the project will have met their success, and potential risk factors that may prevent or inhibit them from being successful, along with the detailed notes from each meeting.
2. Property mapping for hotel operations.
Hotels are, first and foremost, places to conduct business operations; they are also, to an extent, hospitality products.
As such, when you’re conducting discovery, you mustn’t just focus on the brand’s goals from a high-level, but also take a deep dive into how each property itself operates. A workshop should examine actual workflows for the following processes on an all-day, daily basis:
- Reservation and pre-arrival preparation
- Check in and verify identity
- Room assignment and upgrade
- Coordination with housekeeping
- Guest requests and providing service
- Ordering Room Service or Food & Beverage
- Booking spa, activities, or ancillary services
- Payment processing, deposits, and folio creation
- Service escalation/issue resolution and recovery
- Check out and follow up with guests after departure
When performing discovery with multiple properties, it’s not uncommon for software teams to recognize the discrepancy between what a process is supposed to look like on paper versus what actually happens when the pressure is on.
For example, there may be an elegant front desk process for checking someone into a hotel, as illustrated by an operations manual, yet during peak arrival periods, staff rely on unofficial workarounds in order to get guests checked in in a timely manner. Likewise, a guest messaging workflow that was developed to streamline processing guest requests may break because there are multiple inbound channels with which requests are processed. Also, “real-time” housekeeping updates may not be updating the property management system (PMS) as they occur. The goal of discovery workshops is to identify and document what a property actually does versus the documented ideal “SOP” (standard operating procedure).
To complete your discovery efforts, you’ll often need to interview property staff, review the tools used at the property to facilitate their operations, and observe the workflow as guests are actually going through the above processes. If you are executing discovery across multiple properties, it’s also important to determine if/what processes can be standardized across all properties or if/what should remain configurable by property.
3. Mapping the Guest Journey
The process of mapping a guest’s journey in hospitality is one of the greatest opportunities you’ll find in discovering new ideas for your business by moving the conversation from ‘What features would we like?’ to ‘What moments are important to us?’.
For example, the journey of a hotel guest encompasses:
- Pre-booking
- Booking
- Pre-arrival
- Arrival
- In-Stay
- Service Interactions
- Checkout
- Post-Stay Engagement
If you think of journey mapping as a way to identify friction points, align your employees around key touchpoints, and determine where technology can help enhance both the guest experience and operations, you will have completed all aspects of the guest journey.
For discovery workshops, the goal is not to create a pretty diagram and stop there. It is to answer practical questions such as:
- Where does the guest experience break down today?
- Which touchpoints are digital, physical, or hybrid?
- Which guest segments matter most?
- Where do staff intervene manually?
- Which moments create the best upsell opportunities?
- Where do delays, confusion, or duplicated communication happen?
- Which journey steps depend on third-party systems?
An example of this is a hotel may believe they need a full digital concierge app; however, through journey mapping, they’ll discover the pre-arrival communication, routing of service requests,s and/or clarity of check-out are bigger pain points than anything else, thus their priorities will change immediately.
A journey map should look at both the guest-facing experiences and the “back of house” operations. Back-of-house operations, in many cases, create ‘invisible’ processes that shape a guest experience. If your software only enhances one part of the equation (front-end experience) and not the people who do it (back of house), it’s going to feel polished and functional during a demonstration and frustrating in a real production situation.
4. Review of the Integration Landscape
Hotel discovery has great significance during this phase of product development.
While it’s certainly true that a lack of product development can hinder the success of product(s) developed for this sector, more often than not, failure occurs because of a lack of awareness of the integration landscape. Many existing Appricotsoft Hospitality articles will also confirm that proper architecture and system integration are key factors in the success of hotel software products, and many Industry experts will continue to indicate the operational value of establishing proper connections between Property Management Systems and Channel Management Systems.
The outcome of a discovery workshop will include a detailed review of the following items:
- PMS and Version Detail
- Booking Engine
- Channel Manager
- Customer Relationship Management or Customer Data Platform
- Payment Gateway
- Point of Sale
- Loyalty Tool
- Guest Messaging System
- Access Control or Digital Key System
- Business Intelligence and Reporting Layer
- Support Tool
- Data Owners and Contacts for Vendors
APIs, Middleware, Webhooks, and any other Export/Import Workarounds that are available
During this review, a distinction must be made between systems where “theoretically they will be able to integrate” and “we can expect them to reliably integrate in this particular property environment”.
This is a critical differentiation. Not all systems have modern APIs; not all system integrations require partner approval; not all systems behave consistently across regions or property types; not all systems expose a complete set of data; not all systems will be capable of performing real-time synchronization – many require batch synchronization; and finally, while all systems may technically integrate, the resources required to implement the integration will be too large for an MVP.
The result of this thorough discovery phase will be an integration matrix that allows for the development of integration priorities, integration dependencies, integration risks, environments in which the integrations can occur, integration ownership, and the likely complexity of implementing the integrations.
A Standard Process for Hotel Discovery Projects
For most hotel discovery projects, a timeline of approximately 2 to 4 weeks is realistic for focused MVP or single property initiatives; 4 to 6 weeks are typical for broader multi-property or integration-heavy scopes.
A standard process could look like this:
- Week 1: Align and Gather Inputs: Kick off the project with alignment of primary stakeholders on business goals, identification of stakeholders, review of existing documentation, and conduct initial interviews.
- Week 2: Facilitate Workshops and Map Work Flows: Coordination with stakeholders for sessions to map property operations and establish the guest journey through multiple workshops; identify any operational pain points.
- Week 3: Execute Technical and Integration Discovery: Review all systems leveraged and complete a high-level assessment of the integration landscape, constraints, security, reporting, and delivery assumptions for all identified systems.
- Week 4: Synthesize Findings into a Roadmap: Shape backlog items, define MVP boundaries, review risk, establish architecture direction, develop phased rollout plan, and conduct discovery readout.
For larger hotel groups or more complex platform builds, additional time may be required for vendor coordination, property comparisons, and technical validations. Regardless, the priority is always to provide actionable findings promptly, rather than provide long-term deliverables.
What discovery should produce at the end
A successful hotel discovery phase should be characterized by output that can be used to guide development. The following elements should be provided by a reputable hospitality software developer at the conclusion of a hotel discovery mapping exercise:
1. Project Brief – a high-level snapshot of the project that captures the project’s goals, primary users, scope, assumptions, constraints, and success metrics
2. Stakeholder Map – identifies all key participants, decision owners, approvers, operational leads, and implementation contacts
3. Current State Workflow View – an overview of the current operations of the property or group, businesses that experience a bottleneck, and processes that need to be modified
4. Guest Journey Map – an overview of various guest touchpoints, pain points, opportunities for enhanced guest service, back-room dependencies, and how segmentation plays a role in the overall customer journey
5. Integration Matrix – Systems in which data flows, API status, any vendor reliance, risks, unknowns, and priority levels will have to be defined
6. MVP Scope Recommendation – Define which portion of the solution set needs to be built, what can wait to be built, and the rationale for each of those decisions
7. Prioritized Backlog – User stories/feature groups with acceptance criteria, dependencies, and business rationale
8. Delivery Roadmap – Phases of development, milestones, developer assumptions, range of timelines, and rollout sequencing will then be established
9. Risk Register – Identify unknowns related to integration, organizational objects, timeline risk, as well as any implementation, change management, or scope tradeoffs
10. Decision Log – This log should be established to document significant decisions made throughout the discovery phase, so that the project does not float apart as it progresses through development
This kind of output aligns well with how we think about delivery at Appricotsoft. In our Unison framework, clear lifecycle stages, a shared source of truth, visible risks, decision logs, backlog clarity, and weekly demos all help prevent the project from becoming a black box.
Mistakes That Hotel Teams Need to Avoid During the Discovery Process
Using discovery merely as a sales gesture
Workshops used solely to validate a set of predetermined features versus workshops used to validate assumptions are two very different things. The former is purely decorative while the latter is useful.
Placing too much emphasis on features
Hotels always start from a perspective of how they will add mobile check-in, digital concierges, upsell modules, or messaging to their operational delivery model – all proper inquiries. However, the initial focus of discovery must be on validating the context of operational delivery and how guests will experience these deliveries.
Ignoring property-level realities
While the overall vision is directed by group leadership, properties will operate with workflows. If the property is not heard/accommodated during discovery, it will be harder for them to adopt solutions.
Underestimating the impact of integration
Hospitality technology systems do not just represent a technical matter; they represent the drivers behind what the MVP will be, what can be automated, and where manual fallback will be required.
Not providing focused outputs
A “better guest experience” does not represent a deliverable. Teams need focused outputs, prioritized objectives, measures of success, and decisions.
How hospitality discovery is handled by Appricotsoft
At Appricotsoft, we try to create practical, honest, and useful discoveries for the decision-makers. We don’t consider the use of jargon to hide complexities. We want to bring trade-offs to the forefront as soon as possible; by documenting decisions and moving to work software as soon as possible, we can create an environment of least ambiguity. This is the way we demonstrate our values of being honest, responsible, quality, and curious.
To address the above four goals, we generally look at the following four areas of focus at the outset of a hospitality project:
- The actual business goal behind the project.
- Workflow of property operations and guest interactions that are most significant.
- Systems that could either speed up or hinder the delivery of the project.
- The best way to create a Minimal Viable Product is to deliver measurable value.
The discovery and execution of the above should be interconnected, meaning that the discovery meeting should not result in a PDF-file graveyard but rather a backlog, timeline, and plan to execute that teams can actually use.
If you are exploring hotel software initiatives, these Appricotsoft articles may also help:
- How to Structure Hotel App Architecture That Scales for a deeper look at hotel platform structure and technical planning
- Hotel App Development: Roadmap From MVP to Rollout for a practical view of phased hospitality delivery.
For external research, guest journey mapping and integration planning are additional topics that can provide valuable collaboration with other aspects of the hospitality industry (for example, many hotel staff use point-of-sale touchpoint diagrams to identify areas for improving guest experiences). Finally, a wide variety of current articles regarding property management system integration point out why integrated systems are important to delivering “connected” services.
Concluding Thoughts
A well-organized discovery workshop does not delay the delivery of hotel software; instead, it accelerates the timely delivery of the right hotel software.
A well-organized discovery workshop aligns hotel executive teams with their hotel’s goals and objectives, gives operations teams a voice in the software development process, uncovers the true experience of the hotel guest who makes a feature request, and highlights potential integration risks before they become financial surprises to the hotelier. The most important benefit of a well-organized discovery workshop is that it converts your aspirations into a tangible action plan.
If you are searching for a hospitality software developer to support the development of a hotel mobile application, digital concierge platform, or other guest experience solutions, the discovery phase of the development process will reveal whether or not the partner you are interviewing can think beyond just writing code. A true partner will educate you on your property, your guests, your system, and the implementation path for your software solution before pushing your project into the delivery stage.
This leads to the creation of improved hotel software: providing clarity first and then executing on that clarity.