How a Small Guest Services Team Delivers Five-Star Service

Luxury Napa Valley hideaway Milliken Creek Inn & Spa, a member of the prestigious Four Sisters Inns collection, is using ALICE's concierge technology, ALICE Concierge, to help their four-person front desk team provide guests with the kind of exceptional concierge service expected of a much larger team.

Guests of Milliken Creek Inn, a 12-suite boutique that sits on a lush three acres overlooking the Napa River, count on the property's guest services team to help them take full advantage of everything this idyllic wine country hotel and locale have to offer. For the Inn's four front desk staff (who not only double as the property's concierges, but also have other roles in the hotel, including General Manager!), this means helping guests plan their trip from the moment guests book their trip through the time they checkout. Milliken Creek's front desk team therefore need a robust tool like ALICE that can help them coordinate complex guest itineraries and facilitate the multi-step planning and booking processes that characterize concierge work.

In addition to using ALICE to book guests' offsite activities like vineyard and winery tours, restaurant reservations, and spa appointments, Milliken Creek's front desk staff use the technology to help them organize on-property activities like their nightly wine- and cheese-tasting hour, assign and coordinate pre-arrival amenities like champagne and rose petals, and to also keep track of items loaned to guests, like DVDs.

Staff at Milliken Creek Inn appreciate many aspects of ALICE's technology that were not features of the concierge software they used previously. This includes the "user-friendliness" of the tool, as well as ALICE's text messaging functionality, which allows the Inn's staff to easily confirm guest reservations with the spa's therapists and keep records of those exchanges that are accessible to any hotel employee. Most importantly, they value the professionalism ALICE's printed itineraries and confirmation letters and emails confer the concierge operation. Says Tamara Mims, Vice President at Four Sisters Inns, "The guest itineraries and confirmation emails we can create with ALICE are better looking and more professional than anything we've had in the past. Achieving the same consistency and sophistication in formatting without ALICE would take our front desk staff a lot of time they don't have. ALICE, in this way and more, makes our lives much easier."

"What sets Milliken Creek Inn apart from other Napa hotels is the level of service we offer our guests, despite our size. Our concierge program is an important part of this, and our ability to cater to our guests the way we do would not be possible for a four-person team without the help of a very capable and reliable piece of software like ALICE. It's as if we had another member of our team!," adds General Manager David Jessup.

About ALICE

ALICE is the leading all-in-one hospitality operations platform that enables hotel staff to do their most impactful work. Task management, real-time communication, and operational analytics reduce the complexity and chaos of hotel operations providing the transparency and flexibility needed to run efficiently. Founded in 2013, ALICE works with more than 2,500 hotels and tens of thousands of hotel staff across many of the world's leading brands, including Hilton Hotels & Resorts, Graduate Hotels, and Grupo Posadas. ALICE won 7 HotelTechAwards in 2022: winner of Best Concierge Software & Best Housekeeping Software; finalist for its Guest Messaging, Maintenance, and Staff Collaboration Tools; Top 10 People's Choice; and Top 10 Best Places to Work in Hotel Technology for the fifth straight year. https://www.aliceplatform.com/.

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