Velimo Hotel
Highly customizable mobile & smart TV app for hotels
Overview
Velimo Hotel is a white-label app built for hotels, allowing them to quickly and easily implement a digital solution that offers a range of customer services including mobile check-in, room service, service requests, staff chat, smart QR door unlock, mood lighting, and custom on-screen content.
Objectives
- Fast and easy setup for hotel managers
- Fully customized content and features
- Run on iOS, Android and smart TVs
Client
Infomoss
Industry
Hospitality
Location
USA, Deutschland
Tech Stack
ReactJS
JavaScript
Wordpress
NodeJS
AWS
Redis
Project challenges
One of the main challenges was to ensure easy customization without the considerable effort generally experienced when creating a new flavor from a white-label app.
We wanted our target user - a hotel manager - to be able to customize over 90% of the app, without the need for specialist technical skills or training. To do this we implemented a configuration interface built on WordPress for maximum user-friendliness.
The second major challenge was the consistency of experience - ensuring that the functionality and aesthetics were identical whichever smart TV or smartphone the app was used on.
Technical Overview
Core technologies for this project were WordPress and React Native.
We picked WordPress (WP) to create a highly customizable app that pulls its config data from the WP API. The WP admin interface is used to create the app configuration items, like: primary and secondary color, menu items, features set, company logo, company name, etc.
We went with React Native (RN) for the build due to its ability to yield fast results, having a single codebase that is compiled to Native iOS and Native Android apps. This brings several advantages: less code to maintain, fewer developers to pay, less time spent developing a new feature, fewer opportunities for bugs - the list goes on.
In conjunction with Redux, RN offers a very reliable foundation for building modern apps.
Some of the features we built: offline mode, push notifications, smart QR code door unlock, ambient lighting controls (based on Philips Hue), 1-to-1 chat, local persistence, offline mode, and others. And the list of technologies we used includes: react, react-native, redux, react-redux, redux-persist, redux-thunk, react-navigation, styled-components, ramda, babel, and others.
Outcome
Velimo Hotel is now a highly customizable, stable, and modern app and it offers smart-home features in hotel rooms. The app can be controlled via a familiar, user-friendly TV-based interface or via smartphone.