Field notes from the front desk

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…

A living laboratory

The Statler Hotel at Cornell University sits in Ithaca, New York, and is unlike almost any other hotel in the world. Operated by Cornell's Nolan School of Hotel Administration, it runs as a working property where students learn the discipline of hospitality by doing it. Every front desk shift, every service recovery, every operational decision is also a lesson. The standard, accordingly, is high.

When the Statler's leadership decided to modernise its digital guest journey, they needed a platform that could keep up. Innspire completed its deployment across the property in May…

The Quiet Art of Welcome

Hospitality begins long before the door opens. It lives in the angle of a reading lamp, the weight of a folded towel, the particular silence of a room that has been waiting for you. The best hosts know that comfort is rarely loud. It is the second pillow you didn't ask for, the note left in handwriting, the sense that someone, somewhere, has thought of you kindly. True welcome asks for nothing in return, and yet it leaves the guest changed: softer at the edges, more willing to stay a while.

On the Geography of a Good Stay

A great room is not measured in square meters but…