1 | BRANDING
THE PITCH There are go-to apps for nearly every vertical, yet surprisingly the hotel industry lacks a prominent application or technology to facilitate their guest’s stay. Front Desk was created to fill this gap; it is a ubiquitous mobile application for seamless hotel concierge services. Hotel guests do not yet have the convenience of flying cross-country, walking into a hotel having pre-checked in, without downloading separate applications for each individual hotel they may stay at. This application provides a customizable platform that makes your stay at a hotel more comfortable. All hotel services from check-in to room service will be right on your mobile, which saves you time and effort while you’re on the go. The solution is to provide hotel guests with an application (mobile/web) that lets them know about and easily avail the services provided by a hotel. The application will provide the following features to its users: • Pre-check-in room service (extra towels, toiletteries) • Housekeeping
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F R N T D E S K
Josefins Sans
Every guest entering a hotel should feel the elegant and royal touch of the luxurious hotel experience. Travelling is an opportunity to revitalization and enjoy the atmosphere of peaceful yet enchantingly romantic space. Front Desk is an application that invigorates the hotel experience by bringing the riches straight to your fingertips. The design taps into your luxurious trip by keeping the guest comfortable and the hotel employees informed.
CHECK IN
Feature Flexibility & Analytics
2 | RESEARCH We interviewed 8 hotels and talked with 10 diverse employees to understand and survey the hotel environment to improve upon the current conditions. There are several apps out there, each trying different things, but most of them are also in nascent or conceptual stages. Alice is one of the few that has gotten 3 million in a seed funding round but has few partnerships and only 8 downloads. The funding this app received is a good validation that there exists a market for this kind of technology. Neon is currently dabbling in about 25 hotels in the U.S., and have a similar idea for a single app. However they limit hoteliers to provide features in a single, question answer sort of format, which is simple but quite limiting for most hotels. VirtualHotel, Handheld and iRiS have more mature platforms, but are more focused on providing hotels with individual apps, rather than a ubiquitous one Of course, hotel chains have their own apps.
Charlotte Specificity
Hotel Guest
Ubiquity
Charlotte travels a lot and wants to get her hotel room immediately. Hotel checking-in can be a hassle. Her sister surprises Charlotte by booking the same flight but did not have time to book a hotel. Charlotte decides to change the room into a double.
INTERVIEWS & SURVEYS
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
PERSONA
3 | FEATURES
FRONT DESK
FRONT DESK
Profile
Housekeeping
How may we help you?
Create Your Own Request
Reception
Replenish Tolietries
Name
Jacqueline Yeung
Room #
368
Comments
Non Smoking
Current Requests
Valet & Shuttle
Late Checkout Request
Completed Requests
Extra Bed Today, 11:20am
Input Time
Calculate Time
Room Service
Smoke free Room
2 Dishes Today, 10:00am
Tap to Agree to Share Location
Estimated Time till Your Arrival
6 MIN Pre Check-In
Housekeeping
Extra Bed
Hotel Information
Additional Room Send Requests
Luxury Amenity
PRE CHECK IN
GET ACCESS
SEND REQUESTS
TRACK YOUR REQUESTS
Notify Hotel Employees when you’ll arrive to check in quicker without any delay.
Understand what your hotel offers without having to call the front desk.
No longer do you have to creep out the door to find the housekeeper.
Stay on top of your requests by tapping into your profile.
4 | FINDINGS “it would have been better if there was an email login rather facebook, it all depends on if i’ll this app a lot. I would use this because I don’t travel a lot, maybe if I were a businessman. ”
The hotels will have access to a fully-customizable web portal to input the information about the amenities and services they provide. An important feature of the portal is that it will perform analysis on the data collected and provide insights on the following: • Efficiency of service delivery • Forecasting of resources required in the future based on seasonality. • Information about amenities. • Payments. • Feedback about services.
We had 88% of our participants who prefer to call the front desk rather than go down and speak with someone. The following graph shows what they were most likely to need from the front desk.
“i was expecting this [FrontDesk] to contact a cab”
“it was kinda annoying, that i had to logged in to go all the way to housekeeping”
The customer facing mobile application will be targeted towards people who frequently stay in hotels across the country. (businessmen, consultants, airline crew etc) The web portal is targeted towards hoteliers.
USER TESTING QUOTES
5 | UPCOMING FEATURES
Room Service
Valet & Shuttle
Items Selected Breakfast
2 Items Lunch
Welcome to Shadyside Inn Hotel
Hotel Shuttle
Other
Dinner
Hotel Information
Parking
Call Hotel
$5.00 Honey Toasted Melt
7 mins
Shuttle A Blueberry Banana Multigrain Pancake Platter
Shuttle B
$6.00 Mixed Berry Platter
$14.00
Tremendous Twelve
Place Order
ROOM SERVICE
slide to view
Suggestions
Website
Shuttle C
28 mins
Shuttle A
45 mins
Shuttle B
45 mins
$12.00
5 mins ago
Roll on your fresh sheets! Your house keeper completed your requests.
20 mins
$14.00 Hearty Man's Combo
FrontDesk
VALET & SHUTTLE
HOTEL INFORMATION
NOTIFICATIONS
6 | how it works Web Application
Collections Smart Packages Methods
Javascript
Publish Subscribe
Publish Subscribe
MongoDB
Core
Server Code
Core
Node.js
DDP
Session
Smart Packages
HTML
CSS
Native APIs
&
HTML 5 JavaScript CSS
Collections
Client Code
Templates (Handlebars)
Minimongo
Javascript Dependency Management
Spark
Methods
DDP
iOS
more....
Connections DOM
Transport
The two most important and interesting pieces of our setup are Meteor and it’s Cordova (also known as PhoneGap) integration. Above is a block diagram of the open-source architecture we used. Meteor is a technology stack that is becoming extremely popular that is built for modern, scalable, real-time applications. It is built on top of node.js and therefore we write JavaScript both on the client and server, keeping development consistent. As shown in the diagram below, Meteor is an amalgamation of several technologies and, while it does have a slight learning curve, facilitates rapid application development and iteration. We used the non-relational database MongoDB, which is document-oriented and helps us be flexible in storing information about the users, hotels and services.
Android
Black berry
webOS
Apache Cordova is a cross-platform framework that enabled us to package our app which we wrote in JavaScript and designed in HTML & CSS (along with Bootstrap 3) into a native mobile app. This popular framework has undergone major development in recent years and helps us seamlessly port our app to Android, iOS, BB OS, Windows Phone and several others, if required. Cordova connects web technology to native mobile APIs and helped us gain access to the device functionality such as GPS as well as UI elements. Meteor integrates well with Cordova and we put the two together to get a great mobile app stack.