White-label app for hotel guests

Overview and objectives

Velimo Hotel is a white-label app built for hotels, allowing them to quickly and easily implement a digital solution that offers a range of customer services including mobile check-in, room service, service requests, staff chat, smart QR door unlock, mood lighting, and custom on-screen content.

I was part of the team that develop this product and the main objectives were:

• Fast and easy setup for hotel managers
• Fully customized content and features
• Run on iOS, Android and smart TVs

Challenges

One of the main challenges was to ensure easy customization without the considerable effort generally experienced when creating a new flavor from a white-label app.

We wanted our target user - a hotel manager - to be able to customize over 90% of the app, without the need for specialist technical skills or training. To do this we implemented a configuration interface built on WordPress for maximum user-friendliness.

The second major challenge was the consistency of experience - ensuring that the functionality and aesthetics were identical whichever smart TV or smartphone the app was used on.

Outcome

Some of the features we built: offline mode, push notifications, smart QR code door unlock, ambient lighting controls (based on Philips Hue), 1-to-1 chat, local persistence, offline mode, and others. And the list of technologies we used includes: react, react-native, redux, react-redux, redux-persist, redux-thunk, react-navigation, styled-components, ramda, babel, and others.

Velimo Hotel is now a highly customizable, stable, and modern app and it offers smart-home features in hotel rooms. The app can be controlled via a familiar, user-friendly TV-based interface or via smartphone