Improving Hospitality Service With Back End Development

img | January 2, 2023

Introduction

On Friday (30/12/2022), Gerald a 3rd year student studying computer science in Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) presented his internship project at Bukit Vista. After studying computer science fundamentals for the past 2 years, he has developed an interest in the field of back end engineering. And is here to explain more about the back-end project he executed in Bukit Vista. 

Operations Background In Bukit Vista

As a leading company in hospitality services, Bukit Vista’s reservation and hosting team works all 7 days of the week to give guests the best experience possible. Their work doesn’t stop when guests book accommodations but continues even after the guests leave its accommodations. While on their stay, it’s common that guests will ask for help regarding problems they faced, inconveniences, or other requests such as transportation, tickets, cleaning, etc. 

In a day, there are multiple requests that need to be handled by the Bukit Vista hosting team, in which each of them can be requested by different guests, at different times, at different properties with different purposes and conditions. With limited team members, handling up to 50 guests checking in each day can be quite a handful, since the operations team works in a fast paced environment to try to keep guests happy by having a fast response time to their inquiries.

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Bukit Vista operation team handling multiple inquiries from guests.

Transportation requests integration with slack

One of the most common requests that the operation team handle every day is a guest’s request for transportation. Bukit Vista can help arrange transportation from the airport to their accommodation vice versa, and also a pick-up service from anywhere to help our guests with the transportation needs by contacting partner drivers and see if they can provide a service for the guests.

It might sound simple at first, but in reality there’s a lot of steps to go through to arrange a transportation service. The first one is filling in guest’s details such as drop off point, arrival/pickup time, guest amount and many more. After that, the operation team  have to negotiate the price with drivers, or by cross referencing multiple tables on different platforms to find the correct price. Finally, the operation team wait for confirmation from our partner drivers to see if they can take the order. Here is an illustration of the process in the image below.

As you can see a lot of work needs to be done just for handling one request, imagine doing this multiple times in a day while also handling other types of requests and problems that our guests has been experiencing.

Implementation

But luckily, now the internal systems and platforms have been integrated to handle transportation requests in order to reduce the workload on the operations team. By using JavaScript and a Slack API Service in the backend side of Bukit Vista platforms,  now guests can make their requests by filling in their details on their own, and the operations team would be notified via Slack so that they can confirm it to the drivers. There would be no need to cross reference multiple platforms for prices anymore, as the prices would be automatically set via Bukit Vista database while the guests fill in their details. Here you can see the new flow of transportation requests in the image below.
 
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Result & Impact

The new feature in the guest portal has reduced the workload of our hosting team by a significant amount, what used to be a tedious process to complete can now be completed in a matter of minutes because it only takes a few steps to do so. Here are the results that Bukit Vista team and guest can now use in order to make a transportation request during their stay with Bukit Vista.
 
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In the first picture, we can see the guest portal website that can be used by guest to order transportation by their own, besides reducing the workload of the operations team, utilizing the guest portal also reduces the probability of any wrong details being filled, because it will be the guest that makes the request. The second picture shows what the operations team will see on a daily basis when a request for transportation occurs, as you can see there is a formatted message on the ‘details’ section, the  operations team can directly forward that to our partner drivers in order to confirm with them.


As you can see from the picture above Gerald’s tool is able to be implemented and help the guest have a much smoother process from booking their place to arriving in their accommodation, ensuring a delightful stay.

Inspiring project right? Bukit Vista always appreciates the Vistans and Visterns, who Inspired Delight and created an impact for employee, guests, and partners. Join us in creating the next innovations that positively transform the hospitality industry on our careers page!

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