Expect Me Launches A Revolutionary SaaS Room Selection Platform

About Expect Me

Expect Me has developed a revolutionary room selection and upselling tool for the hospitality industry. On their platform, hotel guests can select their room from a floorplan, as easy as picking their seat on a plane. This provides a personalized experience to guests, while offering the hotel incremental revenue opportunities and increased guest satisfaction.

The Challenge

Everyone knows the unpleasant feeling of arriving in a hotel room that does not meet their expectations. Expect Me is eager to change that and has developed the first room selection and upselling platform of its kind in the market. The heart of the platform and user experience is the hotel’s floor plan, which together with their personalized preferences and room features, will help guests find their ultimate room. They basically wanted to bring a solution that is common practice when booking a flight or theatre ticket, to the hospitality industry.

The objective was to develop a SaaS platform, that is scalable and suitable for a wide variety of hotels worldwide. The solution had to powered by a 2-way integration with modern, cloud-based hotel Property Management Systems (PMS), to automate processes

Key requirements included

• Empowering hotel guests to choose their individual room, matching their personal needs with specific room features.
• Find a technical solution to implement a hotspot feature on the hotel floor plan, to facilitate the selection process and to identify each individual room location. Different icons had to be created for rooms in the original category booked and higher room categories, as well as rooms marked as favorite.
• Create a booking flow that includes room selection, as well as the upselling of other products and services.
• Develop dedicated portals for Expect Me (admin), hotel staff (back-end) and guests booking the rooms (front-end).
• Offer a solution where the hotel is in complete control of content, availability, and pricing through the dedicated hotel portal. Complex upsell logic was implemented to define hotel prices based on room categories, seasonality, and special events.
• Develop 2-way PMS integration through their open APIs to automate processes, maximize revenue opportunities, and facilitate hotel operations. First integrations with Apaleoand Mews.
• Build interactive, single page application, which is scalable and highly responsive across different devices and their screen sizes.

"We are very pleased that we chose Blazeclan as our partner. Being at the launch of a tech start-up in a challenging landscape of finding talents and minimizing time to go to market, building strong partnerships is crucial. Blazeclan was (and still is) a match made in heaven. They truly understand the position you’re in as a start-up, give advice in building a strategic roadmap and provide insights to have the crucial foundation and architecture in place to scale.”

Roeland Verhamme - CEO & Founder, Expect Me

The Solution

Blazeclan’s team of SaaS experts implemented the following approach to meet their requirements.

• Blazeclan designed the solution using a SaaS model to support the high availability by deploying the cluster of machines in multiple availability zones (Data centres).
• Deployed front end code base in AWS S3 storage and integrated with CDN CloudFront that supports 250,000 requests per second and data transfer of  150 Gbps
• Wrapped microservices code base in docker containers and finally orchestrated in Elastic Kubernetes Services.
• Used AWS Fargate serverless containers to minimize the customer cost.
• ReactJS was used to develop the front end and NodeJS to develop the microservices in 3 portals (Admin, Hotel, Guests).
• The AWS Cognito has been integrated to let the user’s signup, sign-in, while staying with industry standards of OpenID.

Benefits Achieved by Expect Me

• SaaS enablement and microservices deployment made the application of Expect Me to achieve multi-tenancy and fault-tolerance.
• Multi-AZ deployment helped Expect Me to realize a highly available, always-on application with minimum downtime.
• ​Creation of 3 different web portals resulted in a highly interactive experience for the application users.
• The application was made to be highly responsive on mobile devices, which in turn enhanced the overall user experience.

Tech Stack