News Briefs

Thanx, the leading guest engagement and retention platform for restaurants, announces today major enhancements to their already powerful mobile app content management system (CMS). Restaurants now have unprecedented control over the design, branding and user experience, without building a custom app with a developer. These enhancements represent an important milestone for restaurants, as it marks the first time an app solution has provided such extensive customization within a white-label framework.

"Good customer loyalty is about more than great rewards; in order to shine, a brand’s digital experiences must be differentiated and easy to use. But, building and maintaining a custom app is expensive and time-consuming. We're thrilled to provide new tools empowering restaurants to create infinitely customizable mobile apps without the prohibitive costs and lengthy cycles of custom development—all without additional fees or software development delays when a brand wants to make a change,” says Zach Goldstein, Thanx Founder and CEO.

Brands can style components to precisely match brand guidelines, going beyond the font, color, and logo basics, allowing for full customization of every element – background and foreground colors, borders, border radius, padding and more. Components within the app can be arranged as desired, even appearing dynamically based on applicability to the user, while completely custom components can showcase new program benefits, limited time offers, seasonal menus and more. As before, restaurants can instantly make and publish changes right from within the Thanx dashboard – without an app store review or incremental fees.

Bubbakoo’s Burritos, the fusion-style restaurant that puts a unique spin on classic Mexican dishes, was an early adopter of the new capabilities. The restaurant saw an uptick in downloads of the new app – an impressive 12.8% increase from February to March.

According to Chief Financial Officer, Chris Ives, “With Thanx, we don't compromise between cost and elegant design in our mobile app. The Bubbakoo’s app seamlessly aligns with our brand identity, and of equal importance — we have the flexibility to modify the app any time to precisely tailor the guest experience to better serve our customers.”

App Onboarding

With Thanx, restaurant operators can customize the app first impression, tailoring the onboarding flow with any desired imagery and messaging. Welcome pages, tutorials, and notifications can be used to educate new users about the program benefits, help them understand how to navigate the app, and ease the transition for existing loyalty members.

Home Screen Customization

Operators can effortlessly update every element of the app home screen, customizing standard and custom components in any arrangement. Precise styling options ensure alignment with brand guidelines, giving control over fonts, background and foreground colors, borders, padding and other elements. Operators can also incorporate personalized content based on the user profile to encourage actions such as collecting profile information, reordering a previous order, or exploring rewards.

Menu Showcase

Restaurant operators can showcase menu items with unique design elements. The menu can either blend cohesively with the homepage design or can adopt a unique style, spotlighting specific menus. Pricing, images, and more pull directly from the ordering platform, streamlining menu content management for all operators.

Loyalty Marketplace

Unique to Thanx, brands can create and edit loyalty program branding, reward design and availability, assign and adjust values, and set expiration dates – all in real time. In addition to ensuring uniform design and branding, this flexibility also allows brands to dynamically update their content and rewards, responding to consumer trends and fluctuating costs, ensuring that reward conversion rates and available rewards are attractive to customers and favorable to profitability.

Ordering and POS Integrations

With Thanx’s seamless integrations with ordering and POS providers, restaurant operators can make changes without the need to coordinate with other technology providers. Merchants can measure order conversion rates and app downloads in Thanx, ensuring any iterations on the app are aligned with business outcomes.

• Precision branding: Displays true-to-brand aesthetics, maintaining consistency in brand identity across all customer touchpoints.
• Advanced menu customization: Enables advanced control and flexibility over menu layouts and options, enhancing the ordering process and catering to specific customer preferences.
• More revenue opportunities: With AI-driven upsell recommendations and personalized customer engagement, ItsaCheckmate kiosks are designed to boost order values and improve conversion rates.
• Seamless integration: The Kiosk solution integrates effortlessly with existing POS systems and supports offline functionality to ensure reliable performance under all conditions. Brands can choose from a range of hardware configurations to suit various operational needs, including wall-mounted, tabletop, or freestanding installations.
• Dedicated support: From pre-installation surveys to professional installation and continuous 
• support, ItsaCheckmate ensures a seamless transition and ongoing assistance, underpinned by extensive warranties and a commitment to operational excellence.
• Inclusive pricing: With pricing designed to accommodate businesses of all sizes, the new kiosk solution offers a range of investment levels with support for multiple payment processors to help reduce credit card fees without profiting from payment transactions.

BeCause, the Danish start-up transforming how the global hospitality, travel, and tourism industries manage their sustainability data, is gearing up to offer a new digital tool that helps global hotel chains meet their reporting and compliance obligations under the European Union's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).

Starting in the second half of 2024, hotels utilizing BeCause's enterprise solution will gain access to a digitized version of the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), the first-ever mandatory and standardized sustainability framework for companies in Europe. With this solution, hotels can efficiently collect and create audit-ready reports on their sustainability data.

Current BeCause users will also be able to apply any existing data collected previously through the BeCause platform and automatically map it to ESRS. Similarly, any data collected for ESRS can then be reused for other purposes such as voluntary eco-certifications, eliminating costly, time-intensive, and redundant processes and multiple input of the same data, allowing hotels to re-direct their resources elsewhere.

"Instead of starting from scratch, hotels will be able to leverage the sustainability data they already have at hand and upcycle it to the ESRS framework for CSRD compliance purposes. This ability to reuse data is a hallmark of BeCause for a reason – not only does it significantly reduce workload and conserve resources, but it encourages transparency and eliminates double-accounting errors," explains BeCause co-founder and CEO Frederik Steensgaard. "By adding the ESRS framework to our platform, we are helping hotels minimize the risk of non-compliance penalties as well as reputational damage," he adds.

Simplifying Double Materiality for Hotels

Following the release of the ESRS framework on its platform, BeCause will also launch a new feature to help hotels address the complex issue of double materiality. This issue asks organizations to report on climate's direct and indirect effects on their business and how their activities affect the environment. The feature will consist of a digitized framework based on the guidelines released by the European Corporate Reporting Lab (EFRAG), enabling hotels to efficiently determine the material matters and information to be reported on.

With 1,100 data points under ESRS, creating this kind of list would typically require large hotels to work with an outside consultant, a process that would usually take months and require costly upfront investment. Once BeCause implements double materiality into its platform – the only one of its kind built exclusively for the hotel and tourism industries – hotels can easily see which of the data points are pertinent to their business and independently determine the material information on sustainability impacts, risks, and opportunities in just a few days.

Modernizing Sustainability Data Management

The BeCause platform is a modern approach to managing hotel sustainability. Instead of manually collecting and transmitting data about a property's environmental impact, BeCause is a centralized hub through which all information seamlessly flows. For instance, hotels seeking GreenKey certification can upload all their data into BeCause and overlay that data against the certification's framework already in the platform.

Any updates to that framework are made automatically so hotels can be instantly alerted when their status is threatened due to missing data.

Travel booking websites like Booking.com also use the BeCause platform to ascertain which sustainable certificates a hotel has earned and automatically sync those with their database, enabling them to present up-to-date information to the consumer – an increasingly important factor in travelers' purchasing decisions. According to the online travel agency's 2023 Sustainable Travel Report, 76% of travelers want to travel more sustainably in the near future, while 43% say they would be willing to pay extra for travel options with a sustainable certification, representing a potentially lucrative source of room revenue for hotels that can meet these expectations.

"With hotels now obligated to report on their sustainability, there is a clear opportunity for them to also capitalize on the consumer demand for more sustainable accommodations by using BeCause to manage their sustainability data holistically," Steensgaard says. "Once on the platform, the data can be used, analyzed, and distributed in many ways. This not only gives hospitality leaders the ability to pursue more climate-friendly projects but also get more value for their efforts. That's a journey we're proud to be part of."

Shift4, a provider of integrated payments and commerce technology, has launched SkyTab Business Intelligence (BI), a powerful reporting and analytics platform to meet the needs of restaurants of all sizes – from small independent restaurants to large enterprise chains. SkyTab BI is among a wide array of new features added to SkyTab POS that deliver advanced reporting capabilities and enterprise management tools, augmenting the software’s already robust functionality.

SkyTab BI enables restaurant operators to see an overview of their entire enterprise or drill down to individual locations and compare data side-by-side in real time with granular filtering options. Additionally, SkyTab has added a number of other new features catering to enterprise restaurants, such as detailed transaction management, revenue center reporting, and multi-location menu management. All of these features are available at no additional cost for businesses using SkyTab.

“I’ve never seen a POS company create this level of reporting and analysis. Historically, we have always had to go to a third-party vendor to get this type of information,” says Allison Varlan, Chief Financial Officer of Live! Hospitality & Entertainment, a SkyTab BI customer. Live! venues are among the highest profile dining, entertainment, gaming, hotel, and sports-anchored destinations in the United States, serving over 55 million visitors annually.

“SkyTab Business Intelligence and our new multi-location menu management tools enable SkyTab to compete for even the largest enterprise restaurants,” says Shift4 CEO Jared Isaacman. “We are constantly adding capabilities to the SkyTab platform without adding cost. We don’t believe every new feature needs to be a module that requires an additional expense. Delivering a best-in-class POS solution at the lowest total cost of ownership will always be our priority.”

SkyTab POS is a best-in-class restaurant technology solution designed to streamline operations, simplify business management, and improve the guest experience. It includes integrated online ordering and reservations, contactless/QR code ordering and payment, built-in marketing tools and loyalty program, mobile devices for tableside ordering and payment, comprehensive reporting, and much more.

CommScope, a global leader in network connectivity, announced the immediate availability of a new suite of RUCKUS Networks solutions designed specifically to drive operational efficiency, sustainability and brand loyalty for the hospitality industry.

The turn-key suite builds on RUCKUS Networks’ worldwide leadership in hotel Wi-Fi®—offering solutions that work in harmony to deliver personalized and elevated guest experiences across hospitality brands and locations. It features the latest AI-driven Wi-Fi 7 solutions for providing the latest high-performance services, and simplifies technology deployment at scale, using AI-driven cloud-based management and assurance to drive operational efficiency across owners, service providers, integrators, and IT managers at properties.

“Loews Hotels is a family-owned brand of 26 luxury hotels and resorts that’s obsessed with delivering the most amazing experience to every guest,” stated Clayton Melson, Senior Communications Manager, Loews Hotels at Universal Orlando. “We’re continuously optimizing our network using recommendations made by RUCKUS AI. We’ve deployed AI-driven RUCKUS wired and Wi-Fi solutions throughout our properties to tailor each guest's connectivity experience to perfection. With RUCKUS AI, we’ve significantly improved our IT efficiency by reducing mean time to identification (MTTI) by 80% and mean time to resolution (MTTR) by 70%. From proactive network management to personalized bandwidth allocation, our AI-driven approach ensures that every guest is delighted."

The suite delivers the purpose-built features that are specific to the hospitality industry and tailored to the needs of the various hospitality stakeholders including:

• Identity-based differentiated experiences: Depending on their loyalty level as per the property management system (PMS), a guest could be offered certain rewards or benefits without any extra charge, i.e., premium Wi-Fi connectivity for specified status or higher-level guests.
• Brand Compliance RUCKUS One™ Hospitality Edition provides a suite of features that deliver 360-degree brand report cards covering brand specific policy compliance, network health and guest experience.
• Industry-aligned License Management: Ownership and on-going management of licenses as it relates to the industry. Licenses are owned by property/ownership groups. Licenses are handled accordingly when property/ownership group change brand and/or LSP/Integrators.

“We are proud that our customer complaints around Wi-Fi disruptions have reduced by 90% since relying on RUCKUS AI. Praise and formal surveys indicate an overall increase in guest satisfaction around excellent Wi-Fi connectivity across our entire property throughout guests' stays,” noted Miguel Fonseca, IT Systems Manager, Royal Garden Hotel. He further added, “With RUCKUS AI, approximate calculation suggests that our cost to handle an incident has reduced by 75%. RUCKUS AI offers us recommendations to continuously optimize our network, something we used to do on an ad-hoc basis. RUCKUS AI has truly enabled us to deliver a ROYAL experience.”

Joseph Martin, Vice President, Product Management for Single Digits Inc., commented, "RUCKUS Solutions have empowered us to provide innovative services that delight hotel guests and enhance their brand loyalty. The hospitality-focused RUCKUS AI platform has given us detailed visibility, with a primary goal of ensuring amazing guest experiences across all managed properties while also streamlining our operations. In numerous instances, RUCKUS’s AI technology has enabled us to proactively address issues, eliminating the necessity for helpdesk tickets."

The RUCKUS Networks hospitality suite features the following solutions:

• RUCKUS One Hospitality Edition: AI-driven, Converged Network Assurance and Business Intelligence platform tailored to the hospitality industry that helps to drive global brand standards and increase brand loyalty. For example, when guests are greeted with a room set to their portfolio preferences, it results in increased brand loyalty.
• RUCKUS® Wi-Fi 7 Solutions: including the high-performance R770 Access Point and the new R670 Access Point—RUCKUS’ first AI driven Wi-Fi 7 AP for mainstream deployments.
• RUCKUS AI™: delivering robust service assurance for IT and business intelligence to hospitality organizations.
• Hospitality Gateway by RUCKUS Networks: WAN gateway enabling simple and affordable deployment of a unified hospitality services solution—delivering features that maximize revenue, increase guest loyalty, provide actionable user information, and improve property-wide employee efficiency.
• RUCKUS IoT Suite: empowering the hospitality industry to deliver exceptional guest experiences, improve operational efficiency, enhance staff productivity, safety and security and thus remain competitive in a rapidly evolving market.

“The RUCKUS suite of hospitality solutions is purpose driven to meet two of the biggest needs in the hospitality industry: improving brand loyalty and operational efficiency,” stated Bart Giordano, SVP and president, Networking, Intelligent Cellular & Security Solutions, CommScope. “We’ve leveraged AI, Wi-Fi 7, and our proven cloud-native network management and assurance solutions to make it easier than ever to deliver amazing guest experiences; scale that experience across services, brands, and locations; and create new efficiencies that span the entire value delivery chain. In other words, it’s never been easier or more cost-effective to deliver and maintain the best digital hospitality experiences.”

For more information on the RUCKUS Networks suite of solutions for hospitality, please visit the RUCKUS Networks website.

CommScope and the CommScope logo are registered trademarks of CommScope and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. For additional trademark information see https://www.commscope.com/trademarks. Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi 7 are trademarks of the Wi-Fi Alliance. All product names, trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.