New York, NY — Newly opened Life Hotel has selected ALICE’s guest text messaging and staff technology to facilitate guest communication and power staff operations. ALICE, the hospitality industry’s leading operations platform, connects every department in a hotel with one platform for all staff communication and guest requests.
Life Hotel – a 98-room boutique that opened this spring in the original Nomad-neighborhood home of Life Magazine – was initially looking for a guest engagement tool, but chose the multi-purpose ALICE platform over a handful of other vendors, once they saw how ALICE improves staff coordination and request management via dedicated task management technology connecting every department of the hotel. Now, all of Life Hotel’s staff departments (front desk, maintenance, housekeeping, and F&B) are using and benefitting from the multi-purpose ALICE platform.
Erin Pepper, Life Hotel’s VP of Brand and Experience, says text messaging is proving a strong differentiator for the hotel, letting staff continuously delight guests with immediate, personalized responses. “Guests are always responding to our texts with, ‘Wow, what a quick answer!’, or ‘Thank you for the helpful information!’,” Erin explains. “I think guests are continuously surprised it’s a real person writing back to them on the other side. In this day and age, with so many bots and automated response systems, I think it’s important that we maintain personal and direct communication with our guests. The “human touch” is inherent to hospitality and with ALICE technology we are able to strike that healthy balance. We also encourage our team to partake in the occasional use of emojis, which is relatable and familiar to our guests. It is almost like they are texting with a friend – which by the end of their stay (and beyond) we are!” Erin says the most common use case for text messaging is pre-stay. Guests often text the hotel to let staff know they’ll be arriving at a certain time and to request early check-in. Guest also gravitate towards text messaging when it comes to requesting a refresh of in-room amenities, like towels or pillows.
ALICE is also helping staff delight guests in other ways. Because Life Hotel’s busy management team doubles as concierges, ALICE’s suite of concierge tools (which include a local vendor database and hotel-branded custom confirmation letters, maps, and itineraries) are helping them quickly become neighborhood experts and provide guests with the trappings characteristic of a fully-staffed concierge team.
ALICE is also improving staff operations behind the scenes. Erin loves that, with ALICE, every staff member is united on one system, with all the accountability and efficiencies that affords – “everyone gets the chime [of a new work order or request] and everyone gets the message,” she says. Creating a digital paper trail of work orders and guest requests is also providing the hotel’s management new insights into the business. Having a record of maintenance issues, for example, allows the maintenance team to systematize reporting and preempt more serious maintenance issues by recognizing patterns in asset malfunction and then addressing things quickly.
In addition to praising ALICE’s multi-purpose functionality, Erin says she’s also been very pleased with how easy the ALICE team is to work with. “It’s been wonderful how amenable the ALICE team is to requests – I’m never told ‘no’ without a solution in the team’s back-pocket. The support team is really fantastic. Our hotel is right by the ALICE headquarters, so whenever we have a problem, they just come by the property… It’s really nice when you have a vendor who is aligned with your same values and provides you with the same service that you strive to provide to your guests.”
