CASE STUDY

The Morrison Hotel: Creating a Five-Star Experience with Snapfix

About The Morrison

The Morrison Hotel Dublin, Curio Collection by Hilton, is a five-star hotel in the city center of Dublin, Ireland. The Morrison boasts 145 spacious and modern bedrooms and suites, meeting and event space, the Morrison Grill restaurant, and the award-winning cocktail bar Quay 14. Overlooking the River Liffey, The Morrison Hotel is surrounded by Ireland’s premier shopping districts, bars, museums, theaters, and visitor attractions which make it a premier destination for local and international visitors.

The Morrison was recently upgraded from a DoubleTree by Hilton to a Hilton Curio Collection hotel. The property was completely refurbished with a redesign and stylistic overhaul of both the lobby area and the guest bedrooms. The hotel remained open during the upgrade, and it continued to perform well financially and maintained high guest satisfaction ratings during the transition.

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Before Snapfix

The Morrison is a busy operation, averaging 96 to 98 percent occupancy annually. The hotel is full most days of the week with 200-250 guests checking in and out every day. Efficient and responsive hotel operations are critical to The Morrison’s success.

Before Snapfix, communication between the maintenance, housekeeping, and management teams was done via email, but many employees didn’t have email. Tasks were often communicated on pieces of paper that would get passed from one department to the next. “If something was broken, there would be about three handovers to get the information,” explains Rory Rooney, hotel manager at The Morrison. “Then someone would need to check whether the room is available. If not, it probably delayed their response time fixing the issue. And since human beings are human, they may forget about it, may resolve it, or may not.”

In addition, issues were only reported by members of the management team. Since the process was based on paperwork, it was difficult for the staff to document and track outstanding tasks. “On the maintenance side, for example, the only things that were reported were done by me and probably a few managers,” said Rooney.

“It just makes the hotel work much better, faster, and resolves issues quicker for everyone.”

Rory Rooney, Hotel Manager

The Morrison Dublin

Why Snapfix

The platform The Morrison chose would be used by the hotel’s accommodation, engineering, assistant management, and management teams, all of whom may not be computer-literate or have the latest model mobile phone. “We wanted a system that was easy,” said Rooney. “That’s the important thing. Because if it’s complex, people just don’t use it. We looked at about three competitors and some of them were quite technical. They were built for engineers, not for us who are working in the industry.”

“That’s why we use Snapfix,” said Rooney. “It’s user-friendly, and it works. The beauty of it is that it takes very little to download the app, to become a member, and to get it working.”

It was also important for The Morrison to improve communication between teams. “It is tricky to coordinate four departments at the same time,” said Rooney. “Snapfix helps coordinate the whole team and streamlines the operation fantastically well.”

“People are busy, they’re running restaurants, they’re running departments.

Snapfix was very easy to set up and train people, and it didn’t take more than half a day to configure Snapfix to our liking.

The Snapfix team was very quick when answering questions and helping with setup, but really, we could do it ourselves. It was that easy to do.”

Getting Things Done

Rooney calls Snapfix The Morrison’s “one-stop shop” for capturing, managing, and resolving tasks. Each person on the team has details about unresolved issues in the palm of their hand, and they can provide status updates to keep everyone informed. According to Rooney, an engineer can “go to one person to tell them whether the room is vacant or not and whether they can fix the problem. If they can’t, they put in the progress and keep track of it in Snapfix.”

Having accountability across the team means that no tasks slip through the cracks. “Hotels operate seven days a week,” said Rooney. “If some person has a day off or needs to leave early, a handover can be forgotten. The item never gets resolved, and no one knows about it. With Snapfix, we can keep track of everything. It just works perfectly.”

Snapfix helps The Morrison ensure five-star guest satisfaction. “Every day we do room checks,” Rooney explains. “We pick four rooms, and a manager or assistant manager will double-check everything from scrapes on the wall to making sure there’s enough soap to checking for mold in the bathroom — everything in the room — and we do that through Snapfix. Before, we used computers which took a lot longer to do. Snapfix is much quicker, much more efficient, and we can track whether the issue has been resolved or not.”

The Morrison also uses Snapfix to manage its fire safety routine. The team does three walks of the building every day to make sure fire safety requirements are being met and that equipment is up to date. Previously, documentation was captured manually on paper. With Snapfix, The Morrison team can easily record fire safety checks on a mobile device as they move through the hotel, and the results are captured digitally for more reliable recordkeeping and easier auditing. “[Fire walks] used to be a paperwork-heavy process, so we do that on Snapfix now,” explains Rooney. “That removes the possibility of the paperwork going missing. I know it’s recorded.”

Snapfix is perfect for

Reactive maintenance

Planned maintenance

Fire safety checks

Guest requests

Compliance

Lost and Found

Snapfix's Impact on The Morrison

Snapfix has improved day-to-day operations at The Morrison by allowing employees to apply their expertise to the important work at hand, not wasting time managing tasks on a computer or with manual paperwork. “I would estimate that with Snapfix, we save about an hour and a half a day between our assistant accommodation manager to our engineering supervisors and management team,” said Rooney. “Streamlining — I know it’s a bit of a buzzword — but that’s exactly what Snapfix has done.”

“With Snapfix, [employees] spend more of their day doing what they’re good at,” explains Rooney. “For example, an engineer who would be fixing, repainting, or resealing during a typical eight-hour day, might have spent an hour and a half on the computer. Instead of reading three pages of reports to see whether there’s an issue with the air conditioner, it’s on Snapfix.”

Snapfix also helped The Morrison overcome language barriers. “We have 35 nationalities working in this building,” said Rooney. “With Snapfix, you can take pictures, highlight, circle — everyone understands what’s to be done. You can use it without writing anything. And that’s important in hospitality.”

“The team is much happier because it’s easy to access information. There’s also a nice satisfaction when resolving an issue on Snapfix, which they quite like.”

Conclusion

By moving to Snapfix, The Morrison Hotel was able to eliminate its inefficient task management system that relied upon paperwork and spreadsheets. Engineering, housekeeping, and management teams now have an easy, mobile, photo-based platform to create, track, and complete maintenance tasks, empowering every employee in the hotel to contribute to its success.

“The satisfaction of our guests is very, very high in terms of items not breaking and guest rooms being well maintained,” said Rooney. “In the first half of the year, we’ve had 3,156 issues that have been resolved. I’d like to think some of them would’ve been resolved before, but I don’t think it would have been 3,156. That’s Snapfix, without a doubt.”

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