Historic Airlie, located in Warrenton, Va., has 17 meeting venues on 300 plus acres. For more than 50 years Airlie operated solely as a conference destination. When Airlie opened its property to the general public for social events and leisure guests, its existing system could not support its growth plans.
Airlie’s team identified that it needed a full-featured, mobile-enabled integrated property-management suite that provided flexible remote tablet check-in and credit-card capture at separate property activity sites. Additionally, the right property software had to provide a fast guest registration process to let the staff personally interact with guests and provide the ability to collect guest data for future initiatives.
“When Airlie opened lodging to public and leisure guests, we found that our existing system was inadequate,” Airlie’s Director of Rooms Suzanne Gilmartin said in a statement. “Maestro enables flexible mobile check-in throughout our 300 plus acre property and supports our company’s efforts to be as paperless as possible.”
The new system also had to support Airlie’s commitment to green operational policies. The property installed the integrated Maestro cloud-hosted solution, which includes front-office and customer relationship management property software; online direct web booking engine; mobile digital signature capture; guest and staff SMS text messaging; guest experience measurement online surveys; WebPro online pre check-in, registration, remote credit card capture; analytics business intelligence, data mining and reporting; loyalty and gift card systems; and activities booking management.
Maestro enables Airlie to provide remote check-in on tablets at each property location, as well as in the lobby at the front desk. To lower Airlie’s hardware requirements, Maestro hosts the cloud system from its secure North American data centers.
“Weddings are important personal experiences. Arriving guests want to be in their rooms as soon as possible,” Gilmartin said. “Maestro’s SMS text functionality lets us auto message guests on their mobile device as soon as their rooms are available. Guests love this. Airlie is a ‘green’ property and Maestro lets us go paperless. Maestro works on iPads with e-Signature capture so there are no registration cards. This makes for a fast, easy check in.”
At check-out Maestro also lets guests review their folio on the tablet’s screen and have it emailed to reduce hard copies.