More Ways to Transform Your Hotel Operations
Expert insights, case studies, and strategies from hotels using AI to boost revenue and delight guests
Multi-property hotel groups face a recurring software problem: the diversity that makes their portfolios interesting — a seven-room inn in one town, a seventy-one-room hotel in another, a former hunting lodge, a restored historic property — is exactly what makes a single operations platform hard to standardize on. Most platforms force every property onto the same modules at the same price, which means small inns pay for housekeeping management they do not need and large hotels pay for guest SMS they already get elsewhere. The result is fragmentation: each property runs its own stack, communication breaks across teams, and the group office loses visibility.
HelloShift partners with multi-property groups by offering an a-la-carte hotel operations platform — guest messaging, staff collaboration, housekeeping management, preventive maintenance, and contactless check-in — that each property can subscribe to in whatever combination fits its size and operating model. The Indigo Road Hospitality Group, a Charleston-headquartered group operating 20+ restaurants and an expanding collection of independent and boutique hotels across the southern United States, uses this approach to run its entire portfolio on one platform without forcing every property into the same configuration. Marcos Oliveira, who oversees hotel operations across the group, walked through how the team chose HelloShift, rolled it out, and is now seeing measurable revenue and review impact from automated guest SMS in a conversation with the HelloShift team in April 2026.
The Indigo Road Hospitality Group is a Charleston, South Carolina-based hospitality company founded in 2009. What began as a single restaurant has grown into a portfolio of 20+ restaurants and a growing collection of independent and boutique hotels across the southern United States, including The Flat Iron Hotel in Asheville, NC, and the soon-reopening Snowbird Mountain Lodge in Robbinsville, NC. The group’s hotel portfolio spans an unusually wide size range — from seven-room inns to seventy-one-room hotels — and emphasizes locally-rooted hospitality with property-specific personality.
Marcos Oliveira oversees hotel operations across the portfolio, supporting general managers at open properties and standing up operations at properties scheduled to open. He brings thirty-plus years of hospitality operations experience to the role, and is responsible for choosing and integrating the technology stack each property uses on day one.
Before standardizing on HelloShift, The Indigo Road team faced a vendor selection problem common to multi-property operators. The group was growing fast enough that a streamlined platform was needed, but the properties were too diverse to force into a single configuration. Marcos described the constraints directly:
“For Indigo Road there was definitely a need that we, as the hotel group, were looking to have something that was streamlined. We wanted something that obviously was affordable because that is a key factor, but also easy to use, mobile friendly, and all about integration. I searched many, many other platforms, but either the cost was exorbitantly high, or I could do one or two items with this platform and then I have to go to SMS, I have to use another platform.”
The team also needed the platform to work with the existing stack. The group runs StayNTouch as its cloud-native property management system across the portfolio, and any new operations platform had to integrate cleanly with it rather than ask staff to copy reservation data between systems.
HelloShift solved the diversity problem by letting each property subscribe only to the modules it needed, on top of a shared platform that group operations can administer centrally. Four capabilities stood out in how The Indigo Road team uses HelloShift day to day.
The single biggest differentiator Marcos called out was the flexibility to subscribe to modules per property. A larger property uses HelloShift’s housekeeping management module to coordinate room turnovers; a smaller inn skips it entirely and pays only for guest messaging. As Marcos put it:
“The same way that all of our hotels are diverse, whether from a seven-room inn to a seventy-one-room hotel, the needs also vary. So to pay the same across all the hotels is like I am paying for something that I am not using. Here, if I do not want to use XYZ, I do not need it. And that is perfect.”
This matters at the group level because it removes the usual ceiling on platform adoption — The Indigo Road does not have to negotiate property-by-property exceptions or carry shadow IT for the smaller inns. Every property uses HelloShift; each one uses the right slice of it.
The most concrete revenue outcome Marcos described comes from automated pre-arrival guest SMS. At one of the group’s hotels, the on-site restaurant fills up well in advance, which created a recurring guest pain point: hotel guests arrived expecting to dine on-property and could not get a table. The complaint pattern was eroding reviews.
The team configured HelloShift to send guests automated SMS two days before arrival and again the day before, offering to help with restaurant reservations and surfacing property-specific experiences. Marcos described the outcome:
“The number-one challenge at one of our locations was communicating with guests for booking dinner reservations because our restaurant fills up extremely quickly. With the SMS we set for two days before arrival and the day before, we are able to capture more guest reservations for the restaurant. Our reviews increased tremendously because a lot of the complaints we were getting was, I am a hotel guest and I cannot get dinner, there is no room for me. Now we are like, we do not have eight o’clock, but we have eight-thirty — is that feasible for you? Great communications, and we capture any special events guests are celebrating: birthdays, anniversaries, babymoons, honeymoons.”
Two reinforcing mechanics drive the impact. First, guests prefer SMS to phone calls and rarely read marketing emails, so a text two days out gets read where a phone call would not connect. Second, the platform allows property-specific tone — at one location HelloShift sends messages in the voice of Butler the Bear, the property’s resident mascot, while another property runs a more conventional professional voice. Personalization at the property level is configurable without losing the group-wide consistency in the underlying message timing and intent.
HelloShift integrates natively with StayNTouch, the cloud-native PMS used across The Indigo Road portfolio, for automatic guest reservation sync and room status updates. The integration eliminates the duplicate-data-entry friction that derails most multi-system rollouts — staff do not copy booking data between PMS and operations platform — and gives the group office visibility into both reservations and operations side by side. For other PMS users, HelloShift also integrates with 40+ property management systems including Mews, Cloudbeds, Oracle Opera, Maestro, and Infor.
HelloShift runs on both desktop and mobile, which lets housekeeping, maintenance, and front-desk teams work from the same source of truth without being tied to a station. The Indigo Road team’s onboarding playbook — refined over the first four or five property rollouts — relies on involving general managers and front-desk agents in the configuration session itself rather than pushing them a finished system. Marcos’s advice to other multi-property operators:
“Before you pitch it to the staff, you have to believe in the product yourself. It takes a lot of research, not a quick decision. And make it interactive — have your GMs, your front-desk agents, whoever is going to be using the system, there during onboarding, because they may see something that you do not. If you go in and say this is what we are doing, you get resistance.”
HelloShift supports this style of rollout. Training sessions can be broken into focused fifteen-minute segments — one for guest messaging, one for the maintenance module, one for internal staff communication — instead of a single one-hour walkthrough that nobody retains.
Adoption speed is the leading indicator of multi-property platform success, and The Indigo Road team consistently brings new staff up to speed quickly. Marcos’s claim is not aspirational marketing language — it is the operational standard at the group:
“It is extremely user-friendly. You can get somebody completely trained in under an hour and a half. I am not making it up — it is just that easy.”
The other operational difference Marcos called out is HelloShift’s support response model. Rather than answering questions with a link to a static manual, the HelloShift team typically responds with a short personalized screen-recording — often under 90 seconds — that shows the answer directly:
“One of the hotels asked about the out-of-office feature. I asked the question and got a quick video — this is how you do it. With other systems I have used, getting support is like pulling teeth. You do not get the training you need, and the manual they send you might be outdated. Here, I get a Zoom video of a minute and a half, share it with the team, and it is literally watch and do.”
For a multi-property operator running on lean overhead, that response model is what makes ongoing self-sufficiency possible across the portfolio.
The dinner-reservation SMS automation is the cleanest measurable outcome. Captured restaurant reservations turn what was previously a guest complaint into a revenue line item — guests get the dining experience they expected, and review scores reflect the difference. Beyond the restaurant case, the platform is now the standard for pre-arrival personalization across the portfolio: special-occasion flags (birthdays, anniversaries, honeymoons, babymoons) flow from guest SMS into the property team’s prep workflow, and post-stay outcomes follow.
The Indigo Road portfolio is growing — eight additional hotels are scheduled to open across the next thirty days to eighteen months, and HelloShift is on the pre-opening budget for every one of them. The group’s confidence in the platform comes from a specific architectural choice: an a-la-carte module structure that meets each property where it is, rather than forcing every property into a one-size-fits-all configuration. As Marcos summarized:
“We have eight more hotels coming within the next thirty days to eighteen months. All our pre-opening budgets are system budgets, and HelloShift is on all of them. If you are another ownership group on the fence, give it a try. The cost makes it affordable, the staff buy-in is fantastic, and you have literally everything at your fingertips.”
For hotel ownership groups and management companies evaluating multi-property operations software, The Indigo Road deployment offers a concrete model: pick a platform that lets each property subscribe to what it uses, integrate it with the PMS the group already runs on, and build the rollout around general-manager involvement rather than top-down rollout.
The Indigo Road Hospitality Group represents a particular kind of HelloShift customer: a growing multi-property group with deliberately diverse properties, running on StayNTouch as the PMS layer, and needing one operations platform that respects that diversity instead of flattening it. HelloShift’s a-la-carte module structure, mobile-first staff experience, integrated guest SMS, and personalized support response combine to make rollout fast across each new property the group adds.
To explore HelloShift for your own portfolio, see guest messaging, the StayNTouch PMS integration, or request a demo.
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Expert insights, case studies, and strategies from hotels using AI to boost revenue and delight guests
