Booking and housekeeping in one system
Booking for all twelve properties runs on one platform, replacing the separate sheets. The housekeeping workflow sits inside the same system.
Hotel management platform case study
Twelve hotels off their spreadsheets — and onto one platform.
A hospitality group running 12 properties had no single view of its own occupancy. We built one platform for booking and housekeeping across the group, plus a guest app for both app stores.
- 12 properties on one platform
- One guest app for iPhone and Android
- Twelve years of records moved, history intact
- React Native
- Node.js
Illustration
In brief
- The client
- A multi-property hotel group. Each of its 12 properties kept its bookings in its own spreadsheet.
- The problem
- No single view of occupancy. To find out how full its hotels were on a given night, someone had to phone round.
- The result
- One platform for booking, housekeeping and group occupancy, a guest app on both stores, 3x direct bookings and 68% faster check-in.
The challenge
Years of records that did not agree with each other.
Most of the difficulty sat underneath the product, not in it.
On paper the brief was an app. In practice it was a data problem with an app on the end of it. A guest booking app is only as reliable as the room availability behind it, and here availability lived in twelve places, each kept its own way.
What we started with
- Twelve spreadsheets. Each property had its own booking sheet and its own habits for filling it in.
- No group view. Seeing occupancy for the whole group meant calling each property.
- Twelve years of inconsistent data. All of it had to fit a single schema (one shared structure for every record) without losing its history.
- Two app stores. Guests needed an app on iOS and Android, without it being built and maintained twice.
So the data migration and the product had to be built together. The app alone would have shown guests the wrong rooms. The data work alone would have left them with no way to book.
What we built
A group platform and a guest app on both stores.
Everything the properties had tracked separately moved into one system, with a guest app on top.
One view of the whole group
A group-level occupancy view shows how full every property is, in one place. It replaced the phone round.
A guest app for iPhone and Android
We built it in React Native, so one codebase (a single set of code) serves both the App Store and Google Play. Behind it sits a Node.js backend, the server the app talks to.
We also moved twelve years of property records into one schema, with their history intact.
The impact
More direct bookings and a faster front desk.
The group now sees occupancy across every property in one place, and guests book through its own app. The figures are the client's own, as reported to us.
- 3x
- direct bookings
- 68%
- faster check-in
- 12
- properties on one platform, so nobody has to phone round to find out how full the group is
What made it work
The hard part was the data, not the app.
Everyone assumes the app is the difficult bit. Here it wasn't. Twelve years of property data had been entered by different people with different habits, and one schema had to hold all of it without throwing history away.
Protect the history first
A screen can be redesigned after launch. A booking history that someone has tidied up can't be put back, so we treated the history as the one thing that couldn't be lost.
Related services
Facing something similar? Start here.
- We run several sites on spreadsheets and need one system for all of them.Web and custom software
- Our guests or customers should be able to book through an app of our own.Mobile app development
- We need the same app on iPhone and Android without building it twice.React Native development
More case studies: the logistics operations platform, the smart home monitoring dashboard and the travel booking and itinerary app. Or see every case study and the industries we work in.
Let's talk
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