Starting our careers in the city, chasing client ad buys and tech gigs, most stories of cool afterparties and overflowing drinks behind the velvet rope we owe to our friend Kory. He was that guy everyone wanted to be around, with a knack for building relationships and forming connections. Kory was the one who thrived on the excitement of being around influential people, artists, and creators. He loved the hustle of staying one step ahead.
Running into Kory now, a decade later, still well-connected and in the game, no surprise he’s a general manager of a swanky hotel and members’ club. It’s one of those places when you walk in, the finishes are plush, concrete walls exposed, and the operation is orderly and fluid. But he tells us not to be fooled - behind the scenes, hospitality is synchronized chaos that requires careful orchestration. The magic of exceptional experiences is about beautifully executed teamwork – motivated, efficient, and perfectly connected. In other words: always on and fluid. It’s a world we are coming to understand well, but from a different vantage point, as a software startup. Nowadays, in frequent discussions with general managers like Kory, a repeated set of narratives are playing out.
THE MAGIC OF EXCEPTIONAL EXPERIENCES REQUIRES BEAUTIFULLY EXECUTED TEAMWORK – MOTIVATED, EFFICIENT, AND PERFECTLY CONNECTED ACROSS DEPARTMENTS. IN OTHER WORDS: ALWAYS ON AND FLUID.
Before the pandemic hit, the biggest enemies to service quality and team coordination were high turnover and seasonality common in this industry. Now some of the best people are gone, and in many ways, it feels like starting over. Maintaining service excellence is simultaneously an art and a chore. When a Instagram influencer @Connoisseur_Brad strolls in on a Thursday morning, fingers crossed that someone’s been there long enough to remember he takes oat milk with his coffee…
Expectations for a general manager are always evolving. Instant gratification provided by social media, commerce, rideshare, and entertainment apps have raised customer expectations of access, timeliness and individualized service. Hospitality staff must go above and beyond to deliver this same personalized, elevated level of service around the clock incoming from all channels.
The difficulty is achieving consistency at scale in the face of these challenges. Technology is a critical component, and although it has woven itself into nearly every aspect of daily life, hospitality often struggled to keep up, running on antiquated systems and ideas. Guests wonder why they have to keep repeating their preferences, and staff is frustrated in keeping up with it all. It feels like one continuous Groundhog Day.
Hospitality technology landscape doesn’t make it easy to deliver a seamless guest experience. In a recent hospitalitynet.com index, we counted over 35 categories of various software solutions available to operators?!.
We do love software, we are a software company after all, but what we see are fragmented systems and fragemented relationships. As a number of digital innovations in the space have arrived in the past 10 years they have been channel specific (booking, social, ...) or vertically oriented (new POSs, new PMSs, new CRMs...) letting the guests and members to stich siloed experience for themselves. But honestly, no matter how much one might love a place, who will bother to download multiple apps to interact with a single property and staff?