“ALICE essentially handles back-of-house communication in one platform, making the property’s guest services more efficient.”
Less than a year after opening in San Francisco, Hotel Zephyr partnered with tech start-up ALICE to reinvent the way hotel staff interacts with guests and to make operations more efficient in the process.
ALICE—named after the Brady Bunch’s beloved housekeeper—is a guest service platform that receives, processes and responds to guest requests. The hotel adopted the company’s ALICE Staff solution, which connects front-desk, housekeeping, maintenance and F&B teams in real time. It essentially handles back-of-house communication in one platform, making the property’s guest services more efficient, providing simple ticket management, monitoring for completion time and a real-time mobile app for service staff away from their desks.
“This new collaboration affords our team the opportunity to connect with guests on a deeper level and take extra care in ensuring they always receive the highest standard of personalized service, which is a top priority,” says Jill Plemons, director of sales and marketing at Hotel Zephyr.
Meeting planners will not only appreciate the efficient service from the platform, but they will also appreciate the significant cost savings that the hotel realizes. “In today’s marketplace, hotels are challenged not only to take care of guests who want service delivered quickly and seamlessly, but also to keep costs under control in the face of pressures from distribution and lodging intermediaries that cut into a hotel’s bottom line,” says Alex Shashou, ALICE’s co-founder and president. “We have created a way to do it—a seamless, efficient operations platform connects all points inside the hotel to simplify hotel operations and make them more cost-effective.”
While the Hotel Zephyr is only using the ALICE Staff solution, the tech start-up offers other solutions as part of its ALICE Suite. For instance, ALICE Guest offers guests mobile, web and SMS tools with a full range of communication and functionality such as ordering services and real-time chat. ALICE Concierge also connects the concierge and guest instantly so that concierge can respond to guest questions in a timely fashion.
