Field notes from the front desk

A building with memory

The Refinery Hotel occupies a 1912 building on 38th Street that served as home to New York's hat-making industry for decades. A tearoom opened on the ground floor in the same era. The building's industrial bones are still visible: 12-foot ceilings, factory windows, distressed hardwood floors. The vintage sewing machine details worked into the furniture were not invented for atmosphere — they were borrowed from the building's actual history.

Simon Tichelaar, Director of Guest Relations, works within that history every day. His job is to translate what the building carries…

We're honouring the heroes behind the hotels. Discover the stories of visionary General Managers, the challenges they've overcome, and how Innspire helps create more human, connected guest experiences.

Watch the full feature: Niles Harris, Park Lane New York — Innspire Hotel Stories

The person behind the property

Park Lane New York sits at 36 Central Park South, with a view that most hotels charge a premium for and still cannot fully replicate. Managing a hotel in that position means navigating a particular kind of expectation: guests arrive with ideas already formed. The job is to meet those…

ModernHaus Soho occupies a building at 27 Grand Street, in the middle of the neighbourhood it is named after. 114 rooms, art curated from SoHo's own creative heritage, reclaimed wood floors, a Michelin-starred restaurant at street level, and JIMMY eighteen floors up with a rooftop pool and uninterrupted views across Manhattan.

Tyler Cathcart is the General Manager. He inherited a hotel that already had a point of view. His job is to make sure that point of view reaches every guest, in every interaction, without the hotel getting in its own way.

Watch the full feature: Tyler Cathcart, ModernHaus…

The last unreformed channel

Ask any front desk manager how they spend their shift, and somewhere in the answer will be the phone. Housekeeping requests, early check-in questions, wake-up calls, restaurant hours, parking. The calls are predictable and relentless. Most properties have modernised every other part of the guest journey, from messaging to check-in to the room key, and yet the phone still works the same way it did in 2004. Someone picks it up. Someone puts it down. Repeat.

We have sat in enough hotel lobbies to know that this is not a staff motivation problem. It is a design problem…

We want to thank Amanda Baltazar at Hotel Management for a thoughtful piece on in-room entertainment that ran in the June/July print edition. She spoke with Innspire President Anne Frye, alongside Nikolai Ursin from Virgin Hotels and Robin Koetje from Staypineapple. The conversation covered what guests expect, what they actually use, and what the television means for hotel revenue.

The expectation has changed

Guests no longer arrive at a hotel wondering what entertainment is available. They arrive knowing exactly what they want to watch and expecting to find a way to watch it. The shift the…

Innspire will be at HITEC 2026 in San Antonio from 15 to 18 June. Booth 3042 at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center is where you will find the first public showing of Guest Flows, the latest in Innspire TV casting, and the full platform in action.

"Every HITEC is an opportunity to reconnect with valued customers, meet new hotel partners, and share our vision for where hospitality technology is headed," said Martin Chevalley, CEO and Co-Founder. "We're especially excited to introduce a new, flexible approach to Guest Journey that allows hoteliers to start at no cost and expand as their…