AI concierge app

Every answer a guest needs, one chat away

An AI concierge app for a European hotel group, built with agentic workflows and shipped as an MVP in four months. 2,500 downloads in month one, from in-room QR codes alone.

Hero Image

~2,500

Total installs in the first month

~6 min

Average session length

500-600

Daily app opens

4,8/5

App store rating

Short summary

Industry

Hospitality and travel

Location

EU

Services

Product discovery

Mobile app development

AI integration

Team

Technical Project Manager

7 Software Engineers

3 QA Engineers

Timeline

4 months

Our client is a European hospitality group running hotels, resorts, and camps. Their guest data, content, and operations was in several disconnected systems, with nothing that reached guests directly. They wanted one app to pull it together: content, loyalty, and an AI concierge that truly improves the guest experience. We joined as their engineering partner.

The challenge

Building a genuinely useful AI-powered guest app meant clearing a few real obstacles:

  • Scattered systems – Guest data and content were scattered in separate systems, none of it reaching the guest.
  • No self-serve – Guests often couldn’t get simple answers on their own, and wouldn’t call the desk to ask.
  • No spend channel – Guests didn’t receive in-stay offers, loyalty rewards, or any reason to come back.
  • No visibility – The client couldn’t see how guests engaged, let alone tie it back to revenue.

The solution

We built a guest app with an AI concierge at its core that gives guests one place to plan their stay, ask questions, and spend on property:

  • AI concierge – A chat assistant that answers property-specific questions and points guests to dining, activities, and experiences, with links to book.
  • Reservation-linked personalization – A guest enters their booking code and the whole app adapts to their property and region.
  • Content discovery – Guests can browse properties and offers by region, brand, and type of stay, before or during a trip.
  • In-stay offers – Daily offers and notifications nudge guests toward dining, treats, and experiences that drive spend on property.
  • Loyalty program – Points and member-only perks give guests a reason to come back.
  • In-app billing – A running view of everything charged to the room during a stay.

How we built it — From discovery to development

Product discovery

We ran a questionnaire and several workshops with the client to pin their main priorities, then defined every feature and a scope everyone could commit to.

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Clear goals

We set three primary goals: more app downloads, more in-hotel micro-transactions, and a better guest experience. Every later decision had a clear reference point.

Systems and data mapping

We audited the group’s property-management, CRM, operations, and knowledge-base systems to map exactly what the gateway would aggregate and what we would store versus pass through.

Scope and milestones

We expanded our presales estimate into a defined scope, then decided what belonged in the first release and what could wait. The build was mapped into milestones, each a dated set of features, so the scope doubled as a delivery schedule.

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Development

We built the product as a monorepo of three applications: the hybrid mobile app, a Node.js backend gateway, and a headless CMS. We ran the whole build on our agentic engineering workflow, with senior engineers owning every feature end to end.

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Agentic engineering workflow

We ran the build against a project harness of rule files, standards, a self-review agent, and an onboarding agent. New team members became productive almost immediately, and the full backlog was generated through an AI and Jira workflow.

Backend gateway

A thin aggregation layer in Node.js pulls guest and property data from the client’s existing systems and serves it to the app. We store very little ourselves, acting as connective tissue across the group’s stack.

Headless CMS

A Payload CMS admin panel lets our client manage all guest-facing content, served to the app per property and per page.

AI concierge and RAG system

A vector database in PostgreSQL/pgvector, synced with our client’s central knowledge base, powers the concierge. We built an evaluation and prompt-testing loop to keep answers accurate.

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THE END PRODUCT

One app for the whole stay: browsing and offers before a guest books, answers and bookings once they’re there. Linking a reservation personalizes the content.

Hospitality chat

Product features

  • Content discovery
  • Reservation-linked personalization
  • AI concierge
  • Daily offers
  • In-app billing
  • Loyalty points and in-app perks

Content discovery

Guests can browse the client’s properties and offers by region, by brand, and by the kind of trip they’re after, from an active vacation to a family one. It’s how a guest finds their next stay, or gets to know the one they’ve already booked.

Reservation-linked personalization

A guest enters the booking code from a reservation they already hold, and the app connects to it. Content narrows to their property and region and the concierge scopes its answers to that hotel. Unlinked, the app still works as a catalog of their properties.

AI concierge

The concierge answers from our client’s knowledge base, the same source their call center works from, so a guest asking when breakfast runs or what their rate covers gets real answers. We built an evaluation loop that scores its answers against test cases, so it stays accurate.

Daily offers

Driving in-stay spend was the point of the app. Each day it shows fresh offers with images and a notification to match. Guests see what’s on without hunting for a menu, and the client gets a direct channel to in-stay revenue.

In-app billing

Guests can check what they’ve spent and bought at any point in their stay, without a trip to the desk.

Loyalty points and in-app perks

Members collect points and unlock perks and in-app discounts they won’t get elsewhere. It gives our client a direct line to every guest: a reason to open the app, and a reason to come back.

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Outcome

Our client came to us with several disconnected systems and no way to reach guests directly. They now run a single app, built on one gateway that ties those systems together, with the groundwork to modernize their other systems:

  • One app, one system – Guest content, reservation data, and operations now flow through a single gateway instead of separate tools.
  • A direct line to guests – Content, an AI concierge, offers, and loyalty sit in one place, a channel the group never had before.
  • Spend built into the stay – Daily offers and notifications turn the app into a way to drive in-stay revenue.
  • Data from day one – Analytics shipped with the MVP show how guests engage with the app and where revenue comes from, guiding future work.
  • Early traction – With no paid marketing and only QR codes in the rooms, the app has passed 2,500 downloads, and now sees 500 to 600 daily opens and 6 to 8 minute average sessions.

This is the first project where AI wrote the code, inside agentic workflows we defined. Senior engineers owned every feature, and everything passed a review agent and our QA team before shipping. The result? Ten months of work done in four.

Want a solution like this one? LET’S TALK

Most hotel and resort groups have guest data in one system, content in another, and no single channel to reach guests during their stay. If you’re ready to bring it together, fill in the short form below or book a call directly with our client strategy specialist.

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