Skipping the reception queue once and for all
One year ago, the SV group set out to redefine and transform their guest experience. Words can’t express how excited we were to team up with the SV group as their digital partner and draft the vision of a future-proof, digital guest platform: Stay KooooK.
Keep reading to find out more about our magical collaboration.
Contactless hospitality with maximum freedom
Today, the hospitality industry is exploring seamless and contactless experiences for its guests more than ever. Getting people to start coming to hotels again is as hard and important a task as ensuring they have a marvelous and memorable stay.
SV Group’s existing platform was a white-label product that wasn’t flexible enough to incorporate the current demands of the industry. But the group took the challenge head-on: It set out to build Stay KooooK, a state-of-the-art and disruptive platform that will revolutionize the hospitality industry. The target was to create a world where travelers have pure freedom and enjoy a completely contactless, and personalized WOW experience from check-in to check-out.
A new platform for a way of traveling
The digital solution for Stay KooooK helps guests control their hotel experience from their smartphone. From check-in to check-out, they are in complete control wherever they are and whenever they want. The personalized experience also helps ensure the guests visit again.
We built the functionalities using state-of-the-art technology and architecture to provide a better, high-performing, and scalable basis for the future. This included much-improved front-end usability. We built a cloud-native digital solution using a wide array of technologies. By strictly following our principle of ‘use-over-buy-over-build’, our strategic technology portfolio contains managed services from the best-in-class technology providers. Together with SV Group, we have created a wide UX concept based upon an existing style guide, built workflows, and participated in building the platform roadmap.
A set of awesome features for guests and operators:
- Fully digitalized guest journey for the guest: booking, online check-in, hotel access, consumption, cleaning plan, ordering breakfast, bill overview, checkout, invoice submission
- Fully automated operational processes by the automated ticketing system
- Active monitoring to solve potential issues before the guest even notices
- Sophisticated view on all events (check-in, checkout, notifications, etc.) per reservation
For more technical insights from the project, read our latest engineering blog: https://engineering.3ap.ch/post/process-monitoring-with-bpmn/
Agile development in action
During the first few months, we analyzed the existing white-label platform. We replicated and monitored the whole guest journey from booking confirmation to invoice submission after checkout. Whenever a guest was stuck or was at risk of getting stuck — because of lack of data for example — we triggered alerts to the operations team. The alerts were automatically creating tickets in the ticketing system with all relevant guest data to provide an efficient operational process. This monitoring setup helped Stay KooooK in the first phase after opening in September 2020 to run the operative business with their initial platform.
In parallel, we started working on the new user interface which replaced the initial solution in April 2021. During the migration, a part of our team was on-site at the hotel, making sure that no guests had any interruptions during their journey and that the hosts were supported in case of questions by the guests.
This way all guests successfully and smoothly migrated to the new platform. The other part of the team was supporting remotely by implementing smaller requests from hosts and guests on the fly. This helped us implement improvements in real-time — real agile development on the highest level.
Going live was a huge milestone both for us and the SV Group. During the whole project, the team was extremely committed and focused on the goal. Once more, we showed that we can go above and beyond and that we have an awesome team of skillful and talented people.
The secrets behind the success
Within just 12 months, we established the disruptive Stay KooooK guest platform — with a fully digital guest journey based on best-in-class cloud services and a bespoke guest-facing app.
Our incredible achievement was mainly supported by two factors:
- Trust-based partnership
The SV Group put a lot of trust in us and we didn’t have to seek approval for every single decision. This enabled us to work independently, make fast decisions, and move forward at a high pace. Throughout the whole project, the mutual trust grew stronger day by day. - Our Start-up in a Box® approach
Interdisciplinary teams who take ownership: A Start-up in a Box® Champion, software developers, solution architects, UI/UX designers, and Venture Experience Partners enabled us to move truly agile and fast. The clients are always taken through the whole process — from ideation and product design to front- and back-end development including quality assurance and post-launch maintenance.
Besides this, quick decisions through the PO set by SV Group had a huge impact on a final result, and having an existing system landscape with best-in-class service components was the perfect prerequisite for the development of the platform.
A lot of value created for the hotel operators
Getting back to the roots: Hospitality starts with putting people at the center of everything. This is exactly what Stay KooooK does. Because the digital platform takes care of the needs of modern travelers, the platform brings a huge competitive advantage to operators. Having no paperwork not only saves different types of resources, but it also leaves more time for hosts to focus on the guests’ needs on-site, so they can just be there for them and create rich, immersive, and one-on-one personalized experiences.
“This platform will not just change the way guests interact, it will eventually open up new possibilities and revenue streams for hotel operators.”
Kevin Cocco, Product Owner Digital Innovation, SV Group
By involving Conperi — the Machine Learning platform developed by us — into the development, we made it possible for SV to efficiently gather valuable information about the guests and understand more about their preferences. Thanks to Conperi, operators can create the best possible experience and improve future sales.
The platform is based on the latest, best-in-class technologies and offers not only a sophisticated monitoring system of all business processes but is also highly scalable and adaptable for future enhancements.
A magical project for us
The project was special for us from the very beginning. This was our first one in the hospitality sector, an industry that aligns perfectly with our “creating human-centric digital solutions” vision. The project was named MAGIC: Massively Awesome Guest Interaction Center :)
The collaboration with SV Group was truly unique and we want to raise our glasses to Stay KooooK and our awesome client and say thank you for the trust they put in us. Cheers!
