Food and Beverage Ordering Service
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📆 Oct 5th 2021 - 4min read
Hinfo is introducing today their food and beverage ordering service, for properties to drive additional revenue during their guests stay.
Being built into the Hinfo mobile app, your property can now offer a 21st century solution that is both fully contactless and does not break the bank.
Options Prior To Today
If your property is offering room service F&B ordering to your guests, it is very likely you receive orders via at least one of the following methods:
- Paper Pamphlets Delivered To Reception
- Phone Orders via In-Room Phone or Guests Mobile
- In-Person at Reception
While these methods have served properties well for many years, they each have a downside from the guests end of the transaction.
- Paper pamphlets are the opposite of contactless and require time & effort for guests to deliver to reception or be collected by your staff.
- Phone orders create opportunity for miscommunication and sometimes requires repeating of items.
- In-person orders at reception also requires time & effort from guests to detour to/past reception to deliver.
The digital alternative to these traditional methods prior to today, was to offer hotel tablets inside each of your guest rooms, but the cost to integrate these are far out of reach for the vast majority of properties.
With the F&B solution we are announcing today, we have eliminated the issues for traditional methods without the premium cost of other digital solutions.
Primary Features
To explain the thinking behind our design of the F&B Ordering system (called Food & Drink for guests), here are the core principles that we used to build this service.
- Separate Menus with Availability Times and Item Availability
- Images for Each Menu Item (Optional)
- Dietary Tags
- Keyword Search by Item Names and Descriptions
- Customizable Options for Each Item (e.g. size of drink, choice of meat etc.)
- Allow for Multiple On-Site Delivery Locations, in addition to the guests room
- Allow comments from guests on a per item basis, for full flexibility
- Delivery Time Options (that include minimum time delay, time intervals, on-demand only option) and
- Dedicated tab in the middle of the bottom tab bar, which is visible everywhere within the Hinfo app after guests have downloaded your property details.
How Does It Work For Management?
This built-in service is possible with a dedicated interface built into our Hinfo CMS (Content Management System) for your property management to receive order requests.
This interface has the following features:
- Personalized To Reflect Your Property's Branding
- Multiple SFX to Choose From For New Incoming Orders
- Adaptable interface for viewing/accepting orders on a Desktop, Tablet and Mobile
- Send comment to guests when acknowledging orders
- Send order progress notifications (e.g. accepted, delivering, delivered) with option for single acknowledgement notification only, and
- Statistics for items and orders placed through our F&B service.
Major Benefits of Our Implementation
If we had of build just that above, it would of been a great contactless solution.
But we didn't stop there!
Here are 3 more features we have integrated into our F&B ordering service that makes it stand out.
Multiple Languages with Auto Translate
We are now expanding the use cases for Auto Translate service, beyond hotel compendium details and guest messaging conversations.
With Auto Translate, your property can benefit from the following use case scenarios:
- Creating multilingual menus in significantly less time and for significantly less cost,
- Adding new menu items (and all its criteria) in multiple languages after initial implementation, instantly and
- Communicate the estimated delivery time to non-English speaking guests when accepting orders
All of these translating benefits are included in the same Auto Translate costs at AU$4.00 per language per month
Light and Dark Mode Support
The food and drink ordering section of the Hinfo app, behaves exactly the same as every other when it comes to displaying property colours during the day and/or dark colours at night (if enabled by the guest).
Dark Mode (or Night Mode on Android) has been proven to reduce eye strain at night, which is great when guests are ordering dinner/late night snack.
This means your property's branding colours and fonts will be reflected during the day and night, unless each guest individually has decided to prioritze a dark interface.
No Premium Cost Attached
This is the biggest one of them all!
Bringing a viable contactless ordering solution to market, has to be above all else cost-effective.
If it was way too far out of reach for most property types and sizes, it would not matter what other innovations we build into our service, if very few properties could afford to use it.
Our F&B ordering service is built on a room chargeback basis, which eliminates any additional/separate credit card surcharges etc.
The entire Hinfo service has been designed to be very data efficient, and we have followed these same principles when developing our F&B solution.
Finally, we designed this built-in service to have act as a natural substitution to receiving orders from guests via paper pamphlets, phone or in-person.
This means our whole service from the guests perspective is now contactless, mobile and in their preferred language, while management will receive all orders through a single dedicated interface.
With this, we have announced that our 'Food & Drink' ordering service is available to all properties, at no additional cost on-top of our standard cost-effective membership, which breaks down to only a few cents per room per night.
