Expanding Cloudbeds to Boost the Guest Experience

Cloudbeds’ award-winning hospitality management software seamlessly combines solutions for front desk, revenue management, distribution, guest acquisition, and guest engagement in a single unified system.

Background & Goal

Cloudbeds, an all-in-one property management system for hotels & hostels, offered several award winning products that were all hotel-facing and helped streamline operations. The company also offered a revamped online booking engine. The company wanted to develop a product strategy for how to begin offering a product suite that could capture the guest’s lifecycle with the hotel, from browsing online through booking, pre-arrival, check-in, in-house stays, check-out and finally post-stay.

However, this was during the peak of the pandemic in the summer of 2020. Stakeholders all disagreed on where to start. It was a perfect place to hold a design sprint. Our goals were 

• Identify jobs to be done along the guest journey

• Vote on jobs to solve for

• Solution ideation

• Vote on solution to prototype & validate

Methods

This design sprint was held entirely on Zoom over the course of two days. We largely used FigJam to brainstorm, sketch, and vote. The goal was to get the full scope of the guest experience documented and to get alignment on a place to start.

Participants

• 1 Product Manager

• 2 Product Designers

• 1 Director of Sales

• 1 Director Customer Support

• 1 Onboarding Team Manager

Day One

1. Brainstorm + Alignment: Agree on the different stages of guest’s interaction with hotel (browsing on website, booking, pre-arrival, check-in, in-house duration, check-out, post stay)

2. Brainstorm interactions in each phase: Participants used sticky notes to identify different interactions, jobs, or revenue opportunities for the different phases.

3. Vote on best opportunities: Using stickers, participants were able to vote for their 5 favorite interactions.

Day Two

1. Review previous day’s brainstorms + voting decisions

2. Crazy Eights: sketch 8 solutions in under ten minutes for top-voted opportunity

3. Prototype: Develop prototype we could work with customer to test

Key Learnings

The winning sketch tackled the pre-arrival segment of the guest’s journey.

Participants agreed:

• The feature facilitated contact before a guest arrived

• handled essential jobs like signing terms

• Gave guests touch point to ask questions, start planning their trip

• Created opportunity to upsell guests (better rooms, add-ons, meals, etc) which could lead to revenue

Prototype**

• We built a prototype of pre-arrival process using Typeform

  • Registration digital signature

  • Arrival time

  • Interest in add-ons — late checkout, add-on meals, room upgrades

• We wanted to test how guests interacted with this form so we could prove the value of the service

** This was very much a prototype, in that it was not integrated or scalable. However, it was able to help us approximate guest engagement + value to the property owner.