The IT team and the corporate Receptions team at RIU Hotels & Resorts have just presented one of their most ambitious projects in recent years: the development of their own internal application for managing tasks in hotels: Riu Staff. This new tool is the result of two and a half years of work to which the company has dedicated an effort of 40,000 hours of development and the contribution of more than 50 in-house professionals; as well as an investment of 450,000 euros in the purchase of devices, servers and wireless networks. The new APP improves guest service due to its speed and agility, and also thanks to the contribution of employees from various hotels who, with their experience, have proposed improvements and expanded functionalities to adapt it perfectly to the hotel's management needs.
The new APP represents a considerable improvement due to the immediacy and agility that it brings to the daily work of the housekeeping, technical services, minibars and management departments, with the novelty that it also works completely Off Line, in case the Wi-Fi of the hotel or device data fails. This is a rare feature in this type of applications. The application also allows you to improve response times considerably and reduce the use of paper.
The first hotel to operate with Riu Staff was the Riu San Francisco in September 2022 and, after successfully passing all the tests, its implementation began, which is currently completed in 27 hotels. The rest of the RIU chain establishments currently use an external application that will be replaced by Riu Staff in the coming months, with the aim that the deployment in all hotels can be completed before the end of 2024.
The application allows different departments to remotely manage their functions through the use of mobile devices. This allows significantly streamlining the supervision, assignment and execution of tasks. The application guarantees the execution and traceability of tasks, showing real-time information on their status to the different user profiles. Key to the design of the application's functions has been the involvement of the corporate Receptions team, which has contributed its in-depth knowledge of the hotel's day-to-day operations. In fact, the application covers many tasks that before digitalization went through the hotel reception.
The new application is integrated with RUMBO, RIU's Property Management System, its own internal system for hotel management that includes various modules to cover all areas of the company. The latter, in turn, is synchronized with the Riu Guest APP, which is the tool that clients use, before, during and after their stay. Therefore, when a client makes a request from their mobile phone, it goes to RUMBO, which sends it to the Riu Staff. The worker executes it and the communication is repeated in reverse to notify the client that its request is complete. Therefore, bidirectional communication occurs that greatly speeds up both communication in the hotel and the resolution of incidents and tasks.
This adaptation to RIU management tools, as well as the involvement of hotel operations staff, has allowed an excellent adaptation to the real needs of hotel workers. Among the improvements introduced are the management of care, creation of tasks or incidents linked to clients and not to the room, as well as ambitious future projects that will also cover the needs of Sanitary Hygiene, preventive maintenance and the management of plays.
Source: Riu Hotels & Resorts.