The findings of this case study were first published on 3ap’s blog.

3ap implements Camunda’s SaaS offering to streamline the end-to-end guest journey set to disrupt the hospitality industry with SV Group’s modern hotel experience.

 

Background

3ap helps companies transform their businesses by creating human-centric digital solutions. Headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, the company works with organizations across industries to digitally transform their existing processes and enhance their user experiences. One of these customers was SV Group, a hospitality company with properties in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. The vision for SV Group’s first innovative Stay KooooK guest experience in Bern, Switzerland involved an end-to-end digital guest journey that makes it seamless for guests to book, check in, enjoy their stay, and check out. The SV Group team enlisted 3ap to build an automated digital guest journey. 3ap selected Camunda for end-to-end process monitoring and orchestration, ensuring that best-in-class SaaS solutions integrated perfectly to create a guest experience that feels like magic.

 

The Challenge

Automating a digital guest experience made up of best-in-class cloud components

The vision for the Stay KooooK guest experience started with the customer first. Inspired by trends such as micro-living and vacation rental homestays, SV Group set out to create an innovative guest platform that would automate every aspect of the guest journey from booking to return visit for a truly seamless experience. The platform was developed by the 3ap team, led by founder and CTO Robert Blust, and works by orchestrating best-in-class cloud services within a single consumer-facing mobile app. The vision for the guest experience was all-encompassing. Guests would be able to book through a variety of platforms, such as Airbnb, Expedia, or Booking.com. Once they arrive at the hotel, they would use their mobile app to effortlessly check in and complete legal requirements including passport checks. Next, they’d unlock their room using a digital key via their mobile device. From there, guests would enjoy their stay, easily requesting guest services via the same mobile experience. When their stay is over, guests would quickly check out via mobile without having to wait for a receptionist’s availability. The entire property of 60-70 rooms would run incredibly efficiently with guests having instant access to everything needed at their fingertips, but with only two to three full time employees needed. Instead of employees focusing on repetitive tasks that can easily be automated, they’d be able to provide friendly and helpful human interaction resulting in an incredibly welcoming and delightful guest experience. The biggest challenge of an ambitious project like this is orchestrating various cloud microservices to ensure everything runs without issue and the guest experience is consistently exceptional. In order to deliver on that experience, a modern microservices, event-driven architecture was implemented. When someone checks in, a process opens the main door, followed shortly by a second process that authenticates the guest room door. The 3ap team wanted to observe the time between processes, to minimize potential incidents and equip the centralized SV Group IT team to act quickly on customer help tickets.

 

Why Camunda Platform?

“Camunda offered the only existing solution that could help us achieve this goal. That’s why we opted to select their SaaS technology to build our platform,” said Markus Feller, Head of Innovation and IT at SV Group. “The 3ap team was essential in helping to develop and rapidly implement a system that allows us to have full visibility and control of our end-to-end processes.”Rather than host a solution like Camunda themselves on 3ap’s cloud, the team chose the fully managed Camunda Cloud SaaS. That way, 3ap could focus on developing the platform and adding business value as quickly as possible. With Camunda Cloud, the team was able to achieve a faster time-to-market, and easily calculate their overall cloud operating costs.

 

The Implementation

“Stay KooooK Bern was set to launch in 2020 with a simple digital guest journey,” said Blust. “But there were a few early challenges with getting booking processes from the various microservices integrated with hotel onboarding processes. That’s when we knew we needed process monitoring to detect potential points of failure quickly.” “If failures are not detected in time, it could be devastating for us,” Feller said. “That indicates we have no control over our process or our data. Instead, we like to know about potential issues before the customer realizes anything is happening.” The 3ap team was able to get a POC up and running in a single two-week sprint and in just months, the experience, as envisioned by the SV group, was live with results that were nothing short of spectacular. Hundreds of 5-star reviews line the pages of travel sites with review after review noting the exceptional, modern experience. “We were able to go live with the platform in September 2020, and feel like we had full control over our process monitoring,” Feller said. “Our guests don’t see any of the complex processes happening in the background, which is hugely important for us. Camunda gives us peace of mind and lets our hosts be proactive with our guests. At the end of the day, our excellent guest reviews and satisfaction scores speak to the platform’s success.”

 

5-Star Results

Today, Camunda Cloud continues to monitor critical points in the guest journey, ensuring that processes are automated and operating correctly within predefined time periods. In the event of a failure or delay within a cloud service, Camunda Cloud automatically alerts the SV Group IT team of the issue via Slack and an incident response tool. While 3ap started with passive process monitoring on Camunda Cloud, they plan to move to active process orchestration so they can easily and seamlessly integrate new cloud services into the platform’s automated BPMN workflow. This will allow them to iterate on the platform continuously, further improving the guest experience.With more and more 5-star reviews each passing day, the SV Group plans to roll this out to additional hotels in the very near future and will be working with 3ap to white label this solution into a turnkey digital guest experience platform to other hospitality groups. “The future is incredibly bright,” Feller said. “We could not be more pleased with the team at 3ap and being on Camunda’s SaaS offering gives us the confidence to scale quickly allowing us to replicate this experience to millions of guests worldwide.”

 

>> To learn more about the technical implementation, read 3ap’s blog.