Schani Hotels sees 900 percent rise in guests following a completely digital guest journey with Like Magic.
One of the world’s most technologically advanced hotel groups has revealed how its latest innovation has helped grow the number of guests following an entirely digital guest journey from 8 percent to 80 percent — a percent increase.
Schani Hotels in Vienna swapped its property management system wholesale last year, adopting the employee and guest experience tool, Like Magic, in the process. Since then it has managed to increase efficiency by 30 percent, become more sustainable and improve staff retention.
Christian Mueller, group technology manager of Schani Hotels, is well known as a champion of hospitality technology and helped to make the decision to implement the data & AI-driven platform to keep the company at the cutting edge. This will allow it to scale more easily in the future but even he has been surprised by the results.
Christian Mueller
Christian says that, despite the fact their previous PMS was quite modern, when Like Magic was adopted alongside its replacement platform it was still able to boost efficiency by 30 percent. The platform allows staff to run operations using a traffic light system of notifications and recommended actions, making the whole process of customer service and property management much more automated. Guests can also perform 80 percent of their daily tasks from one system. This means they can self-serve, requiring no human help to check in, order food, additional linen or pillows, and create their own keyless room key, which only requires their mobile phone. Calls to the front desk have also fallen by around 50 percent.
Like Magic’s platform brings a booking engine, guest platform, employee interface and monitoring tools all into one place, creating a centre of operations for hotel management. This unlocks a completely digital guest journey for guests if they want one — and plenty do. In fact, since adopting Like Magic, the number of guests following a completely digital guest journey has risen 10-fold from just eight percent when Like Magic went live in June 2023 to 80 percent. The improved guest experience has also resulted in a dramatic improvement in reviews from four out of five to five stars on average.
"We expected there would be an improvement but not that much," said Christian Mueller. "It’s been the same story with self check-in. We never expected so many would check in digitally prior to arrival. We were hoping for 50 percent but it ended up being 80 percent. It’s mind-blowing."
"The self-service functionality of Like Magic has been the game changer. Guests can purchase add-ons, add people to rooms and do all kinds of other things without coming down to the reception or making a call. They use Whatsapp to ask for things like extra linen and pillows. It’s just totally seamless for them now, but it applies to our staff too. We changed our whole approach to daily tasks, dropping paper breakfast lists, housekeeping lists and arrival lists. We just don’t need that stuff anymore as the staff are able to see them on their mobile phone. When a room is cleaned, it is marked off as clean on the app, and it’s all updated live. The guest moving into that room can instantly check in."
The dynamic between staff and guests has also changed. Staff used to stand behind a desk but, now that the only tools they need are on a tablet or mobile phone, they welcome guests as soon as they walk in the front door and have coffee with them on sofas in the entrance hall, creating a much more personal and relaxed atmosphere.
"They don’t have to stand at the desk 24/7," says Christian. “They have more time to deliver that personal touch for the guest stay. It helps the staff to focus on the really important things. People assume digital check-in has been around for a while. It has — since 2015 — but was never on a web based application like this, and no one wants to download an app on their phone. Now there are no barriers, guests are voting with their feet. There’s so much they would rather not do face-to-face or over the phone."
The impact of Like Magic has been felt across the business. Like Magic can recognise returning guests, even if they’ve come through an OTA channel, so staff can build a robust guest record and pre-empt their preferences. Before Like Magic, guest communication was only conducted on email and this shift to digital means that 52 percent of all guests choose Whatsapp as a communications channel over email, while 70 percent of those using email are still doing so on a mobile phone.
"Desktop as a communication mode is dead. Guests love to communicate by Whatsapp and it always makes me smile to go through the messages they send," said Mueller. "I’ve never seen so many emojis, kisses and hearts. We make sure the staff know that they can communicate back in the same way. That way they can give the conversations a much more personal flavour. Phone calls to the front desk have dropped by around 50 percent."
The Schani team also made its operations more sustainable by ending automatic daily cleaning of rooms. Guests can request a daily clean free of charge but fewer than 20 percent of guests do so, cutting costs and reducing consumption of energy, water and chemicals. Schani donates money for every day each room doesn’t get cleaned to an association that supports carbon neutral projects around the globe.
Interestingly, Schani hasn’t reduced its staff headcount even though it could have done. The group still considers the personal touch part of its identity, and is now taking full advantage of the additional time staff have available to spend with guests. Thanks to the traffic light — or ‘ampel’ system, hiring and retention have improved too.
"Prior to Like Magic a lot of new staff would join, stay for two or three days and then declare that it wasn’t the style of hotel they wanted to work in or the type of software they wanted to use. That has changed tremendously now. The training time has gone down from around a week to five hours and our employees love using the platform."
"Schani Hotels is a wonderful example of a hospitality company driving forward to stay at the cutting edge and take advantage of what the latest innovations have to offer," said Markus Feller, CEO of Like Magic.
Markus Feller
"It’s fascinating to see them evolve, and use the efficiencies they’ve won to increase the personal attention that guests are receiving from staff. The assumption is often that technology removes the need for staff, but the Schani team are demonstrating how it can simply allow you to refocus a hospitality business to improve the value proposition for guests and this is already reaping rewards."
