From The Dining Room to the hotel room:
How Aigens elevated fine dining accessibility
Background
You’re seated at an immaculately dressed table, a crisp white tablecloth delicately draped over your knees. You look up to see one of the world’s most famous landmarks, the Sydney Opera House, perfectly framed by a pane of floor-to-ceiling windows.
But you’re here for what comes next – plate upon plate of thoughtful, delectable Australian cuisine harvested fresh from the mind of one of Australia’s most exciting and respected young chefs, James Viles.
Welcome to The Dining Room, a waterfront restaurant located in the most prime of prime positions on the Sydney Harbour waterfront. This is less a restaurant than it is a destination: a place where the food more than matches the view, and where diners come from across Australia and the world to sample dishes made with pride using local, sustainable ingredients.
But fame has its price, and in the case of The Dining Room, the cost of success fell on the shoulders of the phone operators taking constant calls.
Problem
A part of the 155-room Park Hyatt Sydney, often called the most luxurious hotel in Australia, The Dining Room is found in the northernmost section of The Rocks, one of Sydney’s most famous and historic neighbourhoods.
Between hotel guests looking to treat themselves, tourists searching for a luxurious end to a day of sightseeing, and gastronomes seeking a uniquely Australian take on fine dining, the restaurant fills easily. The issue is that any of the Park Hyatt’s 300+ guests can choose the in-room dining option, and given the prestige of the on-site restaurant, many do.
Come dinner time, phone operators found themselves regularly overloaded, having to work through extensive call queues. A local labour shortage meant that securing extra staff was easier said than done. Customers, understandably, could become frustrated at the difficulty of ordering their meal.
The Dining Room needed an ordering solution that reduced the pressure on phone operators. The Park Hyatt’s General Manager identified contactless mobile ordering as a key feature, and in a conversation with the Hyatt Corporate Office, they found just that.
Solutions
By the time Park Hyatt Sydney spoke to Hyatt Corporate Office (APAC), Aigens had long been the go-to ordering solution in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. The APAC team knew first-hand the simplicity and power of Aigens, and thought it would be the ideal tool for their Sydney colleagues.
QR code ordering was soon implemented. A hotel guest can use their phone to scan the QR code displayed prominently in their room. This leads them to The Dining Room’s menu, and once their order is placed, it is sent straight to the kitchen and instantly charged to their room.
Park Hyatt Sydney were surprised at how simple the system was to deploy, and how quickly it went live. This efficiency and effectiveness was driven by the Aigens team, says Barry Truong, the hotel’s Information Systems Manager at Park Hyatt.
“The Aigens team is extremely responsive. Any issues that arose whilst preparing for deployment were rectified almost immediately.”
The ability to customise the solution also came as somewhat of a surprise to the Park Hyatt team, who had rarely experienced such flexibility from a technology provider in the past.
“Despite being a new client, Aigens was flexible to tweak the solutions to make it our own” Truong continues. “We had multiple requests and the team made it a point to incorporate as many as they could.”
What's next?
Despite its rather recent deployment, Park Hyatt Sydney have already realised benefits beyond the more manageable workload that their phone operators now enjoy.
“We have already had regular hotel guests giving us positive feedback, citing quicker service times” says Eric Lo, the hotel’s Director of Food and Beverage.
So impressed have the team been with Aigens that they are now looking for more opportunities to work more efficiently and serve their customers better.
“It’s a good start. With the successful implementation of the Aigens solution in our hotel, we hope to explore how we can further tap into mobile ordering and optimise it for revenue generation.
“We see this as just the beginning, and are excited to explore other forms of digitalisation in our hotel with Aigens.”
