CleanHotel

Help hotels bring confidence back to corporations and travellers, by providing real-time cleaning data for hotels. When was the lift/elevator last cleaned? When was my room last cleaned?

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Inspiration

We are the team behind a product, Smart Hotel Rate, that brings corporations, hotels and travel management companies onto the same page by detecting every booking where a company is not getting the discounted rate they negotiated with a hotel, and the platform allows these parties to collaborate in correcting the issue.

With the global pandemic, all corporate travel teams are evaluating when it will be safe to resume normal travel levels and how they can assure their employees of a reduced likelihood of exposure during travel. There are several companies that hotels are partnering with to certify hotel cleanliness, and some of these have data that could be used to benefit the traveler, employer and hotel.

Hotels offering a service like CleanHotel will differentiate their brand with both travelers and corporate customers, increasing both booking volume and customer peace of mind. This service could also be a gateway to other services hotels want to offer via SMS or app (e.g., housekeeping requests, room service orders, etc.).

What it does

During the TravelScrum Hackathon we have developed an API that collects raw digital cleaning data from 3rd-party providers.

The data from this API shows on a given date when areas in the hotel were cleaned, down to individual room level.

For each hotel property we align the cleaning data with standard global distribution systems (GDS) data that corporate travel programs require, and we could make this available as a subscription service.

The service could be used by hotels, corporate travel programs or 3rd parties, such as corporate "duty of care" providers, and it can be displayed on a hotel web site, in a corporate hotel program or elsewhere.

We have provided a sample web page that will show how the cleaning data could be presented. Try me

Our CleanHotel SMS demo shows how a hotel could send travelers a text message at the time of booking, letting them know they will be able to receive hotel cleanliness data upon check in.

If a traveler receives the welcome SMS and does not opt out (by responding STOP), the traveler then will receive a welcome SMS after they check in at the hotel. This message will provide the date and time their room was last cleaned and give them the option to request further data on cleaning for other areas of the hotel (public spaces, elevator landings and restrooms) with a simple one-letter SMS response.

Try it out If you’d like to see the experience we’ve created in this Hackathon, text DEMO to one of these 2 numbers:

+44 7451 286900 UK or +1 201-422-2788 US

How we built it

We divided the task into micro services and each team member was responsible for a service. Each service was built using javascript and made into a Docker image. Deployed in a Kubernetes environment.

The SMS Bot was built in MessageBird flowbuilder.

Each of the service are made for scalability and expansion of functionality.

Challenges we ran into

As the team were in different timezones, it was a challenge to utilise each participants time to the fullest. But we quickly divided our tasks to each participant and had them update the rest of the team via Slack.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We managed to build 3 micro services that interacts with each other and show the possibility there are using raw cleaning data as a new service for the hospitality industry.

  • Hotel Cleaning API
  • Hotel UI to display the data
  • SMS Bot to allow the hotel to communicate with its guest about the standard of cleaning

What we learned

Never underestimate the time it takes to put together media content - we could easily have spent 1 team member on this from day 1. Mixing video content and presentation forms are not straight forward.

What's next for CleanHotel

  • Expand the SMS service to include popular services such as Messenger and Whatsapp, also make the service able to interact with existing communication services a hotel uses.

  • Make the API production ready with full OAuth 2.0 token authentication.

  • Make agreements with hotels and providers of digital cleaning data to enhance the offering.

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