Hospitality Case Study: Wren Urban Nest

About Wren Urban Nest

Steps away from Dublin’s best restaurants, theaters, and museums, Wren Urban Nest provides guests with a quiet sanctuary in the middle of the city. The boutique hotel features 137 ‘urban nests’ that are high-tech, cleverly compact, and efficient. Featuring premium natural materials, Wren Urban Nest’s rooms bring a bit of the natural world back into the city. Wren Urban Nest believes in the power of nature and endeavors to create an environment that gives its guests a great night’s sleep.

The team at Wren Urban Nest is passionate about the environment and believes in taking steps towards a better planet. The hotel is leading the way in sustainability and is Ireland’s first net carbon place to stay. Wren Urban Nest has been recognized for its commitment to sustainability, winning the best energy achievement award in tourism and entertainment at the Business Energy Awards 2023 and named a winner in the energy in buildings category of the 2022 SEAI Energy Awards.

Before Snapfix

As the first net zero carbon hotel in Ireland, Wren Urban Nest is highly focused on sustainability and has implemented engineering equipment that requires specialized care, making reactive and preventative maintenance crucial to the hotel’s success. “As a fully sustainable hotel, we have to operate in the most sustainable manner possible in terms of maintenance,” explains Darren Newman, general manager of Wren Urban Nest. “There’s a lot of additional maintenance that we must do to ensure that the hotel is running effectively. When issues occur, we have to find the correct contractor to come onsite to resolve it.”

Despite the importance of reporting and resolving mission-critical maintenance issues, the process was unorganized and inefficient. “At Wren, we’re a small to medium-sized hotel with a quite small team of about 50 team members,” said Newman. “Communication is key. We have to communicate effectively and efficiently and most importantly quickly.”

“Before we started using Snapfix in the hotel, it was very much word-of-mouth – an email or a text message. There were multiple modes of communication, and some details would get missed or lost,” explains Newman. “For example, if a guest had an issue with their shower, they would report it to the receptionist. The receptionist would write it down, but it may not get to the maintenance team for two or three hours or not until the next day if the maintenance team had finished for the day. If the guest had checked out by then, the issue that they reported never got resolved. By not communicating maintenance issues effectively, it can ultimately damage the guest experience if we as a hotel can’t resolve that issue in a timely manner.”

“As general manager, I’m very much responsible for how the hotel operates, but also the guest experience,” said Newman. “I must ensure that every guest that stays with us here at Wren has a really good time.”

Why Snapfix

Snapfix aligned perfectly with Wren Urban Nest’s desire to maintain high guest satisfaction through efficient service. With Snapfix, all members of the Wren team can communicate quickly via their mobile phones using the simplicity of photos.

“From day one, Snapfix has been great for us here at Wren,” said Newman. “We’ve been able to communicate maintenance problems and issues straight away to everyone from our accommodation team to our maintenance team to our front office team. We know if an issue occurs, we can deal with it. We can get the correct person onsite to resolve it, and we can get that room repaired and fixed in time for the next guests to check in.”

With Snapfix, any member of the Wren team can create a task from a photo, video, QR code, or with their voice. Everyone has access to Snapfix on their mobile device or their desktop computer, making lost or forgotten tasks a thing of the past.

“Everybody uses Snapfix,” said Newman. “All our teams are set up and enrolled through the mobile phone app. It’s handy to take a picture of the item in front of them that needs to be fixed, and they know it will get resolved faster. Our maintenance team can even check the list of items to be fixed on their bus ride to work. They know before they even arrive what issues lie ahead for the day.”

An Ounce of Prevention

Wren Urban Nest is not only using Snapfix for its reactive maintenance requests but also leveraging the app to schedule planned maintenance and conduct regular safety inspections. By ensuring that preventative maintenance is conducted in a consistent and timely manner, the Wren team can get ahead of future issues.

“Whether it’s the air conditioning units being serviced and checked, or the touchscreen panels in the bedrooms working correctly, Snapfix is a great tool for making sure that issues don’t occur in the future because of the preventative maintenance steps that we’re taking,” said Newman.

“Besides general maintenance tasks, we also have a Snapfix group for our fire safety walks, which are done three times per day,” explains Newman. “Each duty manager on shift is responsible for doing a walk throughout the hotel – each corridor, all the public areas, and the back of the house – tapping the phone at each NFC touchpoint. This ensures that they’ve tracked the whole hotel, there’s nothing unusual, and everything is working as it should.”

Wren management can also identify problem areas faster by leveraging Snapfix’s reports and dashboards. “The reporting in Snapfix is great for tracking reoccurring issues in terms of the frequency and location they occur,” said Newman. “For example, if a certain room has had a leak in it multiple times a year, you can find that out very quickly by searching for the room number or the issue itself. We’ve been able to locate some quite serious issues through that feature on Snapfix, which we may not have been able to do otherwise.”

Snapfix's Impact on Wren Urban Nest

With the entire Wren team using Snapfix, the hotel is operating more efficiently, saving valuable staff time. “Before using Snapfix, a guest might mention to reception that there’s an issue, and then reception would either send a text message or an email, and it could easily take up to an hour or longer for that message to be communicated to the maintenance team,” said Newman. “Now, when a guest reports an issue at our reception desk using Snapfix, it takes less than five minutes to get it to the maintenance team. On average, Snapfix saves us about an hour per task easily.”

Conclusion

Using Snapfix to manage their maintenance issues, the Wren Urban Nest team now responds to guests’ needs faster and more effectively. No more text messages and emails getting lost in the shuffle or time wasted passing requests through multiple hands. Everyone on the Wren staff can report an issue through the Snapfix app and know that the appropriate team member will be notified in real-time to take immediate action. In addition, with Snapfix, it’s easier for the Wren team to avoid unexpected issues by scheduling and conducting preventative maintenance activities.

All of this adds up to a better experience for the guests of Wren Urban Nest. “In terms of measurable changes that I’ve noticed since we started using Snapfix, the main thing is guest satisfaction,” said Newman. “We’ve seen a dramatic decrease in negative reviews about maintenance issues, which is great and ultimately was the reason we chose Snapfix. In the end, we wanted to ensure that the guests had the best experience possible here at Wren.”

CASE STUDY

Wren Urban Nest: Making Guest Satisfaction Sustainable with Snapfix