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.
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She holds a Bachelor's degree in Communication & Mass Media from Panteion University of Political & Social Studies of Athens and she has been editor and editor-in-chief in various economic magazines and newspapers.
