Field notes for people who run properties
Guides, reports and working practice from the team building Vestibel — written about behaviour that ships, not roadmap.
The answer your AI should refuse to give
A guest asks about the pet policy at midnight. The confident wrong answer is worse than no answer at all.
The restaurant charge that never reached the room
The single most common piece of lost revenue in a hotel with a restaurant, and the two-system seam that causes it.
The Tuesday that quietly costs you a thousand pounds
A single ordinary day at a twenty-room property, and the six places money leaks when the systems do not talk.
QR menus guests actually use
No app, no sign-up, and a page that knows which table or room it was scanned from.
A shift change that does not close the drawer
Hand-over counts the cash, attributes the variance to the right operator, and leaves the till open for service.
Sharing one tablet between six waiters
Per-tab identity on a shared device, so every order is attributed to the person who actually keyed it.
A stock count that does not stop service
Counting half the store, correcting against live stock, and why an uncounted line must never be read as zero.
Costing a plate before you put it on the menu
Recipes, sub-recipes and modifier pricing — what it takes to know the margin on a dish rather than the margin on the month.
A kitchen screen that tracks items, not tickets
Per-item lifecycle, station routing, and the difference between saving an order and firing one.
A restaurant till that knows about rooms
Charging a dinner to a room is trivial when both live in one system, and a nightly reconciliation chore when they do not.
Selling a bed instead of a room
Six travellers who have never met, one eight-bed dorm, six separate bills. What that requires of the inventory model.
Recording an allergy so it actually protects someone
Coded allergens, free-text qualifiers, and why the warning is advisory rather than blocking.
One ledger per guest, not one per department
Every charge, every tender and every tax on a single folio — and what it takes to split it the way guests actually ask.
Blocks, allotments, and who each one binds
A stop-sell binds your own front desk. An OTA allotment must not. The asymmetry is deliberate and worth understanding.
Housekeeping queues that populate themselves
A cleaning list somebody has to write every morning is a cleaning list that is wrong by ten o'clock.