Best Western Italy - A Digital Transformation Story

2015

The beginning of the partnership between Travel Appeal and Best Western Italy - a prominent hotel group which includes 160 hotels throughout Italy - only one year after Travel Appeal was founded.

Best Western Italy is conscious about reputation management, but they lacked an all-in-one tool for a more comprehensive overview of both the brand and each single hotel.

2016

Best Western Italy adopts Travel Appeal Dashboard for monitoring Customer Feedback of both the entire Brand and individual properties. Travel Appeal continues to support and train group management. They join Best Western employees during educational events and webinars, teaching hotel managers how to fully leverage the Dashboard to improve their hotels’ reputation and performance.

In May, Best Western Italy organizes its annual meeting in the futuristic spaces of H-Farm, the startup incubator where Travel Appeal was born. These brainstorming sessions involved more than 180 hotel managers and uncovered the need to create a new tool to communicate more directly with guests to support them during their entire travel experience. Thus the chatbot was born.

2017

Travel Appeal and Best Western Italy co-design an advanced, Artificial Intelligence powered chatbot tailored to the needs of hospitality chains. They introduce the Best Friend chatbot, a simple mobile app available for all the hotels belonging to the brand. The Best Western Group immediately plans to roll out the product to all 160+ hotels in Italy. The chatbot is designed to help guests personalize their stay and purchase additional services, from the booking to the post-stay stage.

2018

Best Western Italy adopts Travel Appeal’s Coach mobile app for all its managers and gets the first, extraordinary results generated by the Best Friend mobile chatbot. In just one year, the results spoke for themselves: 300.000 euros in revenue; 10.000+ services requested from the guests; 94% of services and products confirmed by the guests directly on the mobile app without any human interaction.

2019

Travel Appeal analyzes internal and external factors and sends ‘Best Western Official Insights’ to all hotel managers on the Coach app to help them improve their performance.

By making extensive use of our AI engine, the Travel Appeal Coach delivers plain language insights on everything that really matters to a business. From operational advice to trends, the Coach is designed to help managers boost the performance of their property and collaborate with their team from a convenient mobile app.