Field notes from the front desk

Thank you to Esther Hertzfeld at Hotel Management for covering The Don CeSar's 2022 Innspire deployment. The article captures a dynamic that comes up often with properties that come to us with a specific brief and then discover a broader scope.

The brief was a mobile app

The Don CeSar, the iconic pink resort on Florida's Gulf Coast, approached Innspire to build a branded mobile app. The initial scope covered mobile check-in and check-out, digital key access to guestrooms, and F&B Everywhere, a feature that lets guests order food and drinks from the pool deck and have the order delivered to…

In October 2020, Virgin Hotels and Innspire announced a new contactless guest experience built around Lucy, Virgin Hotels' guest app, deployed first at their Nashville property. The integration required connecting a large number of hotel systems into a single, branded guest interface. Here is what was built and what it took to make it work.

What Lucy does

Lucy is the guest's primary interface for the full duration of a Virgin Hotels stay. Via the app or the in-room TV, guests check in and out, unlock their room, control lights, temperature and lighting themes, order room service from anywhere…

In 2013, Innspire won the HTNG TechOvation Award for personal device streaming technology — the idea that a hotel guest should be able to cast their own content to the room TV. At the time, that was a novel proposition. Within a few years, it was an expectation.

In 2019, Innspire won it again. The platform was GuestMagic.AI, and it was making a similar kind of bet: that AI-driven personalization, applied across the entire guest journey, would become the standard for what a hotel is expected to know about the people staying in it.

What GuestMagic.AI did

GuestMagic.AI used machine learning and…