The challenge
The group's revenue managers had run the numbers: between OTA commissions, no-show penalties, and the inability to upsell during the booking process, they were losing roughly KES 180M per year in avoidable cost and missed revenue. But the fix wasn't just a booking engine. The guest experience itself was fragmented — different PMS at each property, no shared guest profile, room-service requests handled on paper, and a loyalty scheme that existed on a spreadsheet and was never enforced consistently.
The group's board set a single headline KPI: grow direct-booking share from 28% to 45% within 18 months of launch. Everything else — loyalty, IoT, upsell — had to support that number.
What we built
We started with three weeks of ethnographic research — shadowing front-desk staff, interviewing returning guests, reviewing complaint logs, and mapping every touchpoint from first Google search to post-stay follow-up. The research surfaced a finding the group hadn't expected: 64% of guests said they would book direct if they could see their past stays and points balance at the moment of booking. The loyalty scheme wasn't failing because guests didn't want it — it was failing because they couldn't see it.
The guest app was designed around that insight. A simple, mobile-first booking interface with a persistent "your stays" panel showing accumulated points, preferred room types, and personalised upgrade offers. The app doubled as a room key (BLE-enabled locks at all six properties), an in-room controls panel (lights, AC, DND status via a simple MQTT-based IoT layer), and the channel for all service requests.
Behind the scenes, we unified the PMS across all six properties on a single cloud instance with per-property configuration. The guest profile — preferences, past stays, dietary requirements, complaint history — now travels with the guest wherever in the group they stay next.
Results at 12 months
Direct-booking share reached 59% — 14 points above the 18-month target, hit in 12 months. Average booking value through the app was 22% higher than equivalent OTA bookings (guests were taking upsells they couldn't see on third-party platforms). NPS went from 41 to 59, driven primarily by faster service-request response and the room-key experience on arrival.
"We thought we had a marketing problem. Arton's research showed us we had an information problem. Guests wanted to book direct — they just couldn't see what they were getting. The app fixed that, and the numbers followed."