The hotel information problem, and why paper was never really the answer
There's a laminated folder sitting in hotel rooms all over the world right now. Inside it: a room service menu that hasn't been updated since 2022, a spa brochure for a treatment that's been discontinued, and a local attractions page featuring a restaurant that closed during lockdown. Nobody reads it. Nobody updates it. And yet it persists.
Hotels have always had an information problem. Guests need to know things, check-out times, wifi passwords, where to eat, whether the gym is open on Sunday morning, and the traditional ways of delivering that information are slow, expensive to maintain, and increasingly ignored.
The phone call to the front desk still exists. The paper booklet still exists. But neither of them is actually working very well, and most hoteliers know it. The question is what replaces them and whether the replacement is genuinely better or just newer.
What guests actually want when they arrive
It's worth being specific about the problem before jumping to solutions. When a guest checks into a hotel, they typically have a handful of immediate questions and a longer list of things they'll need to know over the next day or two. The immediate questions are almost always the same: how does the wifi work, where can I eat tonight, what time is check-out.
After that, the questions get more personal. A business traveller wants to know where the nearest pharmacy is, whether the hotel has printing facilities, and how long the taxi to the convention centre takes at 8am. A couple on a weekend break wants dinner recommendations, something to do on Saturday afternoon, and ideally a place nearby that's open for breakfast before noon.
"No single piece of paper answers all of these. But a well-built digital guide comes close."
The laminated folder answers none of them well. A call to the front desk answers them one at a time, at the cost of staff time. A digital guide, if it's designed properly, answers most of them before the guest even thinks to ask.
What actually makes a digital guide useful
The instinct when building a digital guide is to make it comprehensive. Every amenity, every service, every piece of information the hotel could conceivably provide. The result is usually something that looks thorough and gets ignored.
The guides that guests actually use tend to have a few things in common:
- They load instantly on any device. A guest who has to pinch-zoom a PDF on their phone will give up immediately. Responsive, mobile-first design isn't optional.
- They're updated regularly. An out-of-date guide is actively harmful, it erodes trust and creates frustration. If a guest follows your recommendation to a place that's closed, they remember it.
- They surface the right information at the right time. Check-out information matters most on the last morning. Restaurant recommendations matter most the evening of arrival. The best guides are organised around when guests need things, not around what's easiest for the hotel to list.
- They include genuinely useful local recommendations. Not just the places closest to the hotel or the ones with the best SEO. The places your staff would actually recommend to a friend visiting the area.
The personalisation piece, and how much of it actually matters
A lot of the conversation around digital guides focuses on personalisation: tailoring the content to each guest based on their preferences, booking type, or demographic. In theory this sounds compelling. In practice, the complexity of building real personalisation often outweighs the benefit.
The more achievable version is what you might call thoughtful segmentation. A guide that presents different content to someone who booked a business rate versus someone on a leisure package. A guide that knows someone is checking in on a Friday night and leads with restaurant options rather than conference facilities. Small adjustments based on information you already have.
Orana's AI reads your property website and any OTA listings to build your guidebook automatically, detecting which sections are relevant (no spa means no spa chapter) and populating local experiences based on what's actually within reach of your property.
Full individual personalisation, where every guest sees a completely different guide, is a nice idea but requires a level of data and infrastructure that most hotels don't have. The wins come from getting the fundamentals right first.
Integration with the rest of the operation
A digital guide that sits in isolation, not connected to your booking system, not updated when things change, not linked to any kind of messaging, delivers a fraction of the value it could. The hotels that get the most out of digital guides are the ones that treat the guide as part of a broader guest communication system.
That means the guide knows who the guest is, what they've booked, and when they arrive and leave. It means requests made through the guide get routed to the right person. It means when the spa closes for maintenance, the guide reflects that by the next morning, not next quarter when someone eventually reprints the brochure.
It also means collecting feedback in a way that's actually usable. Most hotels have some version of a post-stay survey. Most of those surveys generate data that nobody has time to act on. A guide that captures in-stay signals, what guests clicked on, what they searched for, what they couldn't find, gives you something more immediate and actionable.
A note on the environmental argument
The sustainability case for digital guides gets raised often, and it's real but probably shouldn't be the primary selling point. Eliminating a printed booklet from every room does reduce paper waste. Guests do notice and appreciate it. But if the digital guide is hard to use or out of date, no amount of environmental positioning makes up for a worse guest experience.
The better version of the argument: going digital is the right move for the guest experience, and the environmental benefit comes along for the ride. Lead with that.
The hotels that will get the most out of digital guides over the next few years are the ones that treat them as an operational tool rather than a technology checkbox. Built thoughtfully, kept current, and connected to the rest of the guest journey, a digital guide is one of the more straightforward ways to raise the baseline quality of a stay without adding significant cost or complexity.
The laminated folder had a good run. It's time to let it go.
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