New York, NY — Brooklyn’s Wythe Hotel is using ALICE’s hotel management technology to improve staff task management and staff communication. The 70-room waterfront factory turned independent hotel has been using ALICE’s staff and concierge technology – ALICE Staff and ALICE Concierge – since June of last year.
Before ALICE streamlined task management across the hotel’s departments with a single system, Wythe shared guest requests and internal work orders between employees via a series of shared Google docs, notepads and sticky notes. This system worked well at first, but soon, staying on top of tasks became difficult as the amount of information employees had to consult and share amongst each other increased. This manual system also challenged basic concierge work, as neither the notes nor the internal list the Wythe’s concierge relied on were searchable.
With ALICE’s concierge tool, Erin Webb, Wythe’s head concierge, can now efficiently search for any restaurant or service listed in ALICE’s database of vendors. ALICE lets users categorize vendors they import to the database using any number of tags. When a guest asks for a hotel’s favorite restaurants that serve small plates and great wine, for example, it’s now easy to quickly pull up a list of recommended places tagged with “favorites,” “wine,” and “small plates.” “Before ALICE, it was really hard to present that information elegantly and in an accessible way,” says Webb. “ALICE has been a game changer.”
ALICE is also helping Wythe’s front desk staff juggle their many responsibilities. Unlike many hotels today, most of Wythe’s bookings are made direct, and often over the phone. Wythe’s front desk staff double as reservationists. Adept at multi-tasking, they now have more time to devote to guests. Because all guest information is entered right into ALICE, working at the front desk no longer means manually entering the same information in several different places, or following up with colleagues to see if work has been done. By cutting down on redundancies, and displaying all information in an easily accessible “calendar view,” ALICE is letting Wythe’s staff get back to the business of hospitality. “Hospitality is a tough job,” says Webb. “ALICE has made our lives easier.”
Wythe has been a valued partner to ALICE over the past year, beta-testing ALICE’s package management product and guest texting functionality. After ALICE alpha-tests its products in-house, the company selects a few partner hotels interested in working together with ALICE to optimize new features and components of the ALICE suite of products. Wythe’s tech-savvy operations teams have provided ALICE with weekly feedback to help evolve ALICE’s ideas to fit the needs of ALICE’s partner hotels. When it came to testing ALICE’s new package management tools, Wythe was eager to move from their physical log to a digital, centralized hub for logging packages. Wythe’s front desk team have also been enthusiastic when it comes to experimenting with guest SMS. It’s taking time to figure out the best way to introduce the product to guests, but staff and guests are seeing instant value from the ability to text when rooms are ready, or to let guests know their dry cleaning has been placed in their rooms, among other use cases. “Texting guests is allowing us to maintain our values of hospitality, but also adapt to the times,” says Webb.
