ESS Group is a Nordic hospitality group with more than fifteen destinations, from The Steam Hotel to Jacy'z and Falkenberg Strandbad. They wanted to own the whole guest journey, fill rooms more effectively and know their guests, not treat every booking as a stranger. We have built and run that digital layer for them since 2020.
Every guest with a booking has the same questions. What is included, when can I check in, can I change my stay. They call the hotel to ask, and that is staff time on the phone instead of with the guests in the room. Each booking also arrived anonymous, so the group never built a picture of who its guests were.
We named the project Hjärtat, the heart. It sits at the centre of ESS’s guest experience and connects the pieces into one hub, and like a heart it has to keep beating, warm and reliable, every day.
Min Bokning is that hub in practice, a self-service web app. Every ESS guest can see and change the details of their stay before they need to call, message the hotel directly, and book the restaurants, spa and add-ons that fill the group’s tables and rooms. The right thing reaches the guest at the right moment, and a booking that used to arrive anonymous becomes a guest the group can recognise and look after.
It frees the reception and booking teams from the same questions asked over and over, so their time goes to the guests in front of them. Min Bokning runs on Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL, with Solid Queue for background work and AppSignal in production, and connects to the Visbook booking system so each hotel’s orders flow straight through.
“It comes down to meeting the guest in the right place at the right time. Min Bokning makes that possible across all our hotels.”
Six years and counting. We built ESS’s digital guest layer, and we have kept improving and running it ever since, hotel by hotel as the group grows. Fewer guests reach for the phone, the guest experience is smoother from booking to checkout, and every stay is a little easier to look after.
The digital guest layer for ESS Group, a Nordic hospitality group with more than fifteen destinations. Visit esshotels.se.
Want to know more about this project or how we work, contact Jon.
Tell us about your guests. We will tell you how we would shape, design and build it.
