We love it when we get to roll out enhancements that our clients request! One super-popular request we would get from clients was:
Can we add additional filters and tags within the platform to help take our analysis to the next level?
We faced an interesting challenge with this request…
Lots of groups were asking for something very similar, but with slight nuances, so we wanted to tackle it in a way that would address all of their desired views but within one technical ticket.
As an abstract, we knew that we had to deliver on the following criteria:
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- A way to filter multi-hotel views by additional hotel roles (Regional Sales, Regional Operations).
- A way to designate and filter hotels by ownership group
- A way to customize hotel groupings in the owner report
- A way to filter hotels by region
Our first challenge was the how – in this particular instance we knew that we would need to assign attributes to hotels using some sort of 🏷️ tagging system, but having to update each hotel individually with preset tags would present 2 main challenges:
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- Assigning hotel attributes at the hotel settings level would be too tedious for clients with large portfolios
- Coming up with an exhaustive list of attributes would be too time consuming
Our solution would have to incorporate 2 features:
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- One centralized location where portfolio admins can tag their various hotels quickly
- An ability to handle highly complex, user defined categories.
First we decided on a list of what exactly we would be tagging at the hotel level. Spider has already supported a 🏷️DORM (Director of Revenue) tag for over a year now, so we would keep that tag, but also add 🏷️ownership group, 🏷️hotel class, 🏷️region, 🏷️regional DOS, 🏷️regional VP. (For a total of 6 criteria).
After determining our tags, we then honed in on the location of this enhancement. We decided that ⚙️ portfolio settings was a great location for this new feature, because many settings already lived here that cascaded down to all hotels within a given portfolio.
Lastly, we had to account for the fact that clients would want to tag their hotels with highly customizable inputs. To use an example, we wanted the hotel class tag to be able to accept inputs as simple as “2-star” or as complex as “upper-midscale lifestyle boutique“. Rather that attempt to curate an entire list of possible tags, we decided that a fully customized, text input was best so as not to limit our clients choices.
Here’s a rendering of what the new enhancement looks like after we found a way to execute on all of the criteria above:
Notice that the first 3 tags (🏷️ownership, 🏷️hotel class, and 🏷️region) are all fully user defined. Users can create their own hotel class distinctions that fit their terminology, and fully customizable regions allows for more flexibility, especially for ownership groups with portfolios focused heavily in just one city, state, or region. For example, management companies with 50 hotels in California and 20 in Texas could break out their region tags into [Texas | Northern CA | Southern CA] rather than be restricted to selecting a single state.
This enhancement has been a long time coming, and we hope that you enjoy this new functionality as much as we do!
