Introduction

Lodging service providers need a better way to keep their guests engaged and connected to their communities to improve brand loyalty. It is necessary to find a convenient yet personalized avenue of communication that enables lodges to reach out to their members effectively, share content relevant to their audience, and also give details on upcoming events and room availability to spur action from their members. 

Additionally, guests who book lodging accommodation need to be able to view their lodging information with ease. This assures peace of mind and enables guests to plan their stay at the lodge according to room availability. Based on this need, the idea of the Cahoot lodging app came into being. 

Features 

Cahoot is a lodging app that connects lodging service providers with their guests better than ever before. It streamlines communication between both parties, and comes armed with the following features: 

• Login via email and password, including additional options for signing up and retrieving a lost password
• Users will choose lodge membership and therefore will only be able to see information relevant to that lodge
• Event notifications will be sent to users detailing lodge events to generate buzz for the business
• Users will be able to add feedback about the lodging experience to gauge satisfaction and identify areas for improvement
• The shop/store feature will further enable users to buy products via the Cahoot app

Challenge

Ultimately, we identified three challenges to be among our biggest concerns. These would be the pillars of our app development for the lodging information project. They were arrived at based on the client’s specifications on the outcomes of the app, as well as the acknowledgement that the client already had an existing backend in Drupal. 

Consequently, this allowed our team to shift our focus and outline the following as the key areas of concern that were prioritized and solved in the long run: 

• Professional design: Our client is a reputable and distinguished lodging service. As such, it was a critical requirement that the lodge app development was in keeping with the professionalism and elegance of the hotel in terms of UI, color palette, and general outlook
• User feedback: The client required that the app should incorporate feedback from users describing their stay experiences by way of a form page. These details would then be brought to the attention of the admin through notifications once a guest has submitted their feedback. 
• Different lodge websites: It was the requirement that every lodge should have its websites, from which it can manage its content via its individual backend systems. 

Proposed solution

This was not the first time we were doing a project based on mobile app development for hotels. We have been around the block as a mobile marketing agency, and thus we already had a solid idea of what works and what doesn’t. This helped streamline the perfect workflow to accelerate the project without compromising quality and meet all our client’s deadlines and preferences.

User Types:

• End users (Members of each Lodge)

Platform:

• Mobile application (iOS)

Overall, our company split the project into two phases as follows: 

Phase 1

Typically, the first phase of any of our projects involves sitting down with the client to thoroughly understand their vision and requirements for the app, asking for more details and clarity where necessary. Phase I involved: 

• Determining the client’s existing resources, during which we noted the existence of a Drupal back end
• Gathering more data about the requirements of the company’s content experience platform that we were to design
• Determining the software architecture for the UI design
• Prototyping and wireframing so that client could visualize and approve the final app design before we proceeded to the actual development

Phase 2
During phase 2, we mostly work forward from idea to execution, bringing together the client’s needs into a final product through various strategic technologies we used.

• App development began with front-end design using React Native. We implemented the client’s requirements for the color palette, logo design, and fonts, among other aesthetics
• We used React Native to create natively-rendered apps for Android and iOS since users tend to spend 18x more time on native apps than mobile web apps
• For the backend development, we relied on Node JS. That’s because it offers high performance in real-time, which is key to helping lodge members obtain their information quickly as they need it. 
• Ultimately, we also made it possible for the Cahoot lodge app to be able to obtain data from the Drupal backed as opposed to posting the data to the back end
• We internally tested and then moved on to UAT, before we finally deployed the mobile app after a few minor revisions

Results

We were able to successfully deploy the app to the Google PlayStore and Apple PlayStore, where they have enjoyed tremendous numbers in terms of downloads and ratings. The app is among the top tier in the Travel and Local category in the PlayStore. The client was pleased with the final outcome, as the app has increased engagement for their lodges and even helped boost brand discovery and lead generation. This hotel app development case study lets you know how we handle the project & how our services assist the client.