Virgin Hotels and Innspire: how Lucy became the integration layer for a full contactless stay

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 on property, and make restaurant reservations. At checkout, the whole process completes on the device.

The TV experience runs on Innspire's InnCable product: standard channels alongside hotel information, Chromecast casting, and access to streaming subscriptions. Guests can also browse the Virgin Hotels marketplace, receive food and beverage promotions in their preferred language, and access Apple Music and Fitbod exercise content.

The integration layer

What the guest sees as one app is built on a web of third-party systems that Innspire connects. The stack at Virgin Hotels Nashville included Infor PMS for check-in and check-out, Alice and Guestware for managing guest requests, Agilisys POS for food and beverage, and InnCom and Lutron for smart room automation. Each integration required its own mapping. The guest never sees any of it.

What Virgin Hotels said

Denise Walker, VP of Information Technology at Virgin Hotels, was clear about what the partnership delivered: "With a combination of hardware and software, they've become an integration hub that ties the entire guest experience together."

Derek McCann, General Manager of Virgin Hotels Nashville, framed it in terms of what the moment demanded: "In the future, contactless and seamless will be essential keywords in delivering a safe, fun, and engaging hotel experience. We understand the challenges of seamlessly bringing all the needed hospitality technologies together and excited to see how well it all flows in the hands of our guests."

Why it matters beyond the pandemic context

The Lucy deployment was announced in 2020, when contactless was driven in large part by Covid-era constraints. What has proved durable is not the contactless framing but the underlying architecture: one integration hub connecting everything, surfaced through a single branded interface. The same logic applies regardless of the operational context. Hotels that connected their systems in 2020 are running on better infrastructure today.

Virgin Hotels has since rolled Lucy out as a standard across all properties. Innspire remains the integration layer that makes it run.