San Francisco’s Hotel Zelos, a Viceroy Hotel, has selected ALICE’s suite of hotel technologies to streamline staff operations and enhance the guest experience. Hotel Zelos, which joins sister properties Hotel Zetta and Hotel Zeppelin on the ALICE platform, is using ALICE’s concierge software, ALICE Concierge, ALICE’s housekeeping and maintenance software, ALICE Staff, and the company’s guest text messaging solution, ALICE Guest. ALICE is the hospitality industry’s leading operations technology, connecting every department of the hotel with one platform for all staff communication and guest requests. ALICE recently acquired concierge software provider GoConcierge to augment its technology and customer service offering.
Hotel Zelos, located in San Francisco’s historic Pacific Building in the SOMA district, chose ALICE to replace a service optimization system the hotel’s management inherited from the hotel’s previous owners (Hotel Palomar operated on the same site from 1999 until 2015). Hotel Zelos’ General Manager Sietse Nabben was excited to implement ALICE; a few years ago, he played a significant role in the installation of ALICE at one of his previous properties in Marin County. He saw outstanding results not only in guest service feedback and operational efficiency, but also as a cost control system. Nabben had been looking for an operations toolset more dynamic and intuitive than the legacy software he inherited, and based on his previous experience, he knew immediately how easy it would be to train his growing team on ALICE.
Using ALICE has made an immediate impact to the hotel’s operations. Because there’s now a record of all guest requests and internal work orders (which can be easily analyzed by time of day and day of week), management is better able to align staff availability with guest demand, and thus make more data-driven decisions when it comes to scheduling.
Hotel Zelos’ staff, meanwhile, appreciate the many ways ALICE is improving communication between departments and providing them efficiencies in their work. Tyler Gard, Hotel Zelos’ Director of Rooms, says the housekeeping and maintenance teams have really taken to ALICE’s photo-taking functionality, which lets users snap a photo of a broken lamp or scuffed carpet, for example, and attach it to a ticket, letting their colleagues know immediately where to look and what tools to bring (obviating a lot of cross-communication and trips back and forth). Photo attachments also come in handy when it comes to cataloging guest lost and found items. Now, when guests call the hotel to ask about a lost item, the front desk agent can satisfy the guest right away. Instead of putting the guest on hold, relaying the inquiry to housekeeping, and hoping for a timely response, the front desk can immediately tell the guest whether or not the item has been found, quickly allaying any anxiety.
ALICE is also helping Hotel Zelos better manage the many guest packages the hotel receives daily. Like many city-center hotels, Hotel Zelos can’t rely on a loading dock area to process and store packages, and so the sooner the front desk staff can log packages and remove them from the lobby, the better. ALICE’s package management tool helps Hotel Zelos record, maintain, and easily access a log of incoming and outgoing packages, saving the front desk team time they can now spend with their guests.
“For me, ALICE is the entire package,” says Nabben. “It’s not just staff tickets, it’s also lost and found, it’s also packages, it’s also texting,” he enthuses. Indeed, the hotel is successfully engaging guests with ALICE’s guest messaging technology, which helps staff build a rapport with their guests from the moment of booking. “Texting is a great way to engage with guests in a way many of us now communicate. We’re seeing that by sending a simple, personalized text before the guest arrives, we can positively impact guest satisfaction and help drive guest loyalty,” Nabben adds.
And, just as Nabben predicted, training his staff to use ALICE has been easier than any legacy hospitality solution he and his team have used previously: “There’s a lot of turnover in our industry, so it’s essential we use tools that are easy to train and easy to use. The reason why using ALICE is so intuitive for all of our staff is because it’s similar in functionality and design to many of the apps we all use already in our daily lives,” Nabben explains. “ALICE’s innovation is not only that it streamlines hotel operations, but that it does so in a user-friendly way.”
