Guest Arrival CRM for Hotel Front Desk Teams at IHG

The impact

The Arrivals Summary Report reached 91% active and 71% daily usage across 5,003 IHG hotels by July 2016, with measurable lift in enrollments, member recognition, satisfaction, and problem handling.

I led product ownership for IHG's Guest Arrival Report, the CRM tool front-desk teams used to personalize check-in, shipped to 5,003 hotels across four regions. The work surfaced loyalty signals (status, preferences, anniversary milestones, VIP flags) at the exact moment staff needed them, so a routine greeting could become a memorable one. The usage numbers are the real story: a back-office report that 71% of front desks open every single day is not a report anymore, it is part of the job.

Data they couldn't see might as well not exist

Front-desk staff at IHG were doing a demanding job under constant time pressure, and they rarely had a guest's loyalty history or stay preferences before that guest walked up. The data existed. The Guest Arrival Report existed. But it was not surfacing the right signals in a usable way, and a signal a clerk cannot see at the moment of check-in changes no behavior at all. The loyalty program's whole value was leaking out in the gap between data and service.

So the work was subtraction and timing, not more fields. I worked across CRM, marketing, and operations to find the few things that actually changed behavior at the desk: anniversaries, VIP tier, repeated stay preferences, unresolved service requests. Then I designed a 30+ icon system so a clerk could read a guest at a glance under pressure, and delivered the summary as a daily pre-shift email so staff arrived prepared instead of scrambling. I piloted in the highest-traffic hotels, where volume was greatest and the cost of getting it wrong was most visible, and let that feedback shape every iteration. That is what drove a report to 71% daily use: not more data, but the right signal at the only moment it mattered.

What this built

• A tool that gave staff a reason to go above and beyond. The front-desk quote in this project isn't a tagline - it's what happened when loyalty data became actionable at the human level.
• Expanded internal appetite for CRM investment. The pilot results built the internal case for deeper integrations across more properties and data sources.
• A model for loyalty-driven service moments. The prioritization logic and delivery format established a pattern IHG could apply across other guest touchpoints.