How I designed the pre-arrival and post-checkout experiences for a boutique hotel app. These are the two windows where a guest decides whether the hotel is worth returning to, and where most hotels go quiet. This is where we designed Genie to stay present.
Luxury hotels that use genie as their guest experience app
Genie is an in-stay app for luxury hotel guests. This project extended it beyond the stay itself into the two windows on either side: after a booking is confirmed but before arrival, and from the last night of a stay through checkout and beyond.
Both windows were dead time. A guest booked, then waited. A guest checked out, then vanished. Nothing was asked, offered, or remembered in either gap, so revenue and loyalty leaked from the exact moments that decide both.
Designed the full pre-check-in and post-checkout experiences across every property. Built a seven-step pre-arrival flow, a swipe-based preference capture, an AI itinerary builder, and a post-stay layer covering tiered feedback, a shareable Stay Memoir, and lost-and-found.
The goal was to turn two silent windows into active ones, which meant pre-arrival revenue while intent is high, and feedback and reviews captured before the emotional peak of the stay had faded.
Before any screens, I anchored everything to one guest.
Alexander is 34 and lives in London. He books 3–5 boutique stays a year. He researches obsessively, shares everything publicly, and remembers every detail. He chose this hotel over four others.
His fear
Paying a premium and still feeling like a number.
His quiet truth
He starts composing his review the moment he books, and he decides whether to post it in the hours around checkout.
The one question behind every decision
What does Alexander wish the hotel had done before he arrived, and what would make him talk about it after he left?
The gap between booking and arrival was inactive, so upgrade and service intent went unused while it was highest.
Transfers, SIM cards, and meet-and-greet were arranged by phone at the last minute, pushing coordination onto the front desk.
Room upgrades surfaced at the front desk under time pressure, the worst possible moment to consider spending more.
Email surveys landed days after checkout, once the emotional connection had faded and response rates had dropped.
The hotel learned what a guest wanted in person, if at all, so nothing was prepared in advance.
Unhappy guests left with no way to be heard, then posted public reviews the hotel never saw coming.
Guests willing to leave a great review were never prompted in the moment it would have taken one tap.
The stay left nothing to keep or share, missing the most credible word-of-mouth the hotel could get.
After booking, the guest gets a WhatsApp message and lands on a pre-arrival home screen that opens with a greeting, their confirmed room, and three sections in the order a guest actually thinks about a trip: the room, Enhance Your Stay, and the arrival logistics grouped as things they might need.
The first thing offered is the room. A guest opens their booked room and browses it by space, moving through tabs for the bedroom, bathroom, and patio with a full-bleed photo carousel and an amenity strip underneath. If an upgrade exists for their dates, a nudge sits at the bottom of their own room view, "Exclusive for you: Deluxe Sea View", pointing them to the best-matched upgrade rather than making them hunt.
The second section holds personalization. Personalize Your Stay is a swipe flow: activity and food cards, right to like, left to pass, with the copy setting the frame, "Tell us about you, and we will remember throughout your stay." Only likes are stored, so the hotel learns what a guest enjoys rather than a list of exclusions, and the encouraging line at the bottom shifts as they go.
The third section handles arrival logistics: early check-in with an arrival-time picker, a SIM card on arrival with tiered plans and a delivery location, an airport transfer keyed off a PNR lookup that resolves the flight and suggests a vehicle for the party size, and a meet and greet with optional luggage or wheelchair assistance.
The home screen moves through two states. Pre-departure activates at 8 PM on the second-to-last night; checkout day activates on the morning of departure. The night before, the Stay Memoir hero and a feedback card appear while in-stay services stay reachable. Checkout morning, services drop away and departure tools take their place: Forgot Something, the store, the room bill, and Plan Your Next Escape.
Feedback is the pivot, and it branches because a one-star guest and a five-star guest need opposite responses.
The Stay Memoir is the takeaway. A three-step intro explains it, the guest adds photos and videos from their stay, and the app builds a short film. It gives the guest something to keep and gives the hotel its most credible marketing: a real guest's memories, shared in the guest's own voice.
